perspective

Honeysuckle trails

2009-05-18T12:26:00.002-05:00

The fragrance assaulted me at the first bend in the walking trail. I succumbed immediately.

Inhaling deeply, I searched for the vines that surely grew nearby.

Ah, yes. Ahead on the left, white honeysuckle blossoms greeted me. I passed the vines, still inhaling the distinct aroma and revising the song TV cowboy Roy Rogers sang decades ago. Rogers crooned, “Happy trails to you.” I sang, “Honeysuckle trails to you.”

My honeysuckle trail stretched ahead, an unpaved four-wheeler path bordering three small lakes. That day, the path proved challenging. Recent rains had left the wheel tracks muddy, the center and sides needing mowing.

As my feet sought the best spots to tread, my spirit heard God - singing lyrics from Song of Songs 2:13: “the blossoming vines spread their fragrance. Arise, come, my darling; my beautiful one, come with me.”

Past the third lake, I would step over a low gate. A few yards past the gate, I'd break out into a large, rolling field where the four-wheeler path gives way to a blacktopped walking trail. A fresh wave of honeysuckle aroma washed over me as I approached the gate. Walls of honeysuckle blossoms bordered both sides of the trail just beyond the gate.

Ah . . .

CRACK! A blast like the report of a rifle shattered my reverie. The source of the sound lay ahead – and close. “Surely someone wouldn't shoot across a trail where neighborhood children play,” I thought.

Unconvinced, I almost turned around. Instead, strangely encouraged by the fragrant vines ahead, I stepped over the gate. Treading between honeysuckle walls, I stopped humming and started speaking. “Someone's walking the trail,” I announced. “Someone's walking here.”

Tentatively, I stepped past the place where the flowering vines stopped. Looking to my right, where the sound had originated, I saw the backyard of a neighborhood home. Several men stood there. All looked sheepishly at me.

“What were you boys doing?” I wanted to ask.

Relieved, I stepped onto the blacktopped trail that takes an oval course around the field's perimeter. Topping a small rise, I saw three dogs ahead, playing at the back fence of another yard. I hadn't encountered dogs on the trail before.

The brown boxer and the white terrier spotted me at the same time I spotted them. “Aha!” their faces said.

As the two raced toward me, I slowed my pace, yet kept walking forward. Surely the owner would appear and call the dogs back. I scanned the yard from whence the trio had emerged. Not a person in sight.

The longer-legged boxer outran the terrier. The third dog, a chocolate lab, hesitated momentarily, then joined the race. The boxer reached me first. As I slowed almost to a stop, he jumped up repeatedly, front paws to my chest. The terrier nipped at my heels. The lab galumphed around us.

At last, the trio tired of me and raced back to their yard. I completed the oval trail, stepped back onto the four-wheeler path, trekked past the honeysuckle walls, stepped over the gate, skirted the three lakes and exited the trail, still inhaling honeysuckle scent.

The mud, the gunshot, the dog attack – all conspired to stop me from completing that walk and, even more, from enjoying it. Yet, complete it, I did. Enjoy it, I did.

“Love never gives up,” says 1 Corinthians 13, The Message. It “takes pleasure in the flowering of truth, puts up with anything, trusts God always, . . . never looks back, but keeps going to the end.”

Beloved of God, honeysuckle trails to you.

. . . . . . .

1 Corinthians 13:4,6-7 MSG

Treed!

2009-05-01T16:16:00.003-05:00

Sometimes you get into situations you don’t know how to get out of. Sometimes you run up a tree you can’t get down.

My husband Jerry stepped into the kitchen one evening as I poured chili into two bowls. Our cat Pewter, a Russian blue, sat on the doormat just outside the kitchen door.

As I set the bowls on the table, I saw a flurry of motion through the kitchen window. A large black dog ran onto the mat where Pewter sat. Pewter shrieked and bolted so fast I saw only a gray streak pursued by the gangly black dog.

Thinking Pewter had run around the house, I dashed to the front door, hoping to intercept her. No flurry. No barking. No Pewter. No black dog.

I walked around the house and met Jerry coming the opposite direction. Nowhere in our large yard did we see or hear dog or cat.

We’d never seen the black dog before. Now both he and our cat had vanished.

Then, Jerry spotted Pewter. She cowered high in the bend of a slender birch tree. The tree stood in an untamed grove of trees behind our neighbor’s fence.

Crossing our yard, we stepped through undergrowth and ducked under branches to get to the tree. Pewter sat high above our heads. Her eyes wide and black, she meowed a melancholy meow.

Jerry lamented our failure to teach Pewter how to come down from a tree. “Cats have to learn to come down the same way they went up,” he said. He told Pewter, “Back down the tree.” Pewter sat unmoved.

“Should we get the ladder?” I asked. “No.” said Jerry. “When she gets hungry enough, she’ll come down.”

We walked back to the house. As we stepped into the kitchen, Jerry said, “Maybe. It’s going to get dark soon.”

Leaving our now-cold chili, we retrieved the tall folding ladder from the garage, unfolded it, carried it across the yard and through the undergrowth and leaned it against the tree where Pewter sat. I held the ladder while Jerry began to climb it. The ladder wobbled precariously. The bottom prongs were firmly planted in soft ground, but the tree was so slender, the top prongs encountered only air.

Jerry asked me to get a bungee cord. I set off through the thicket and across the yard and soon returned with the requested item. Jerry wrapped the bungee cord around the tree and secured the ends to the ladder’s top rung.

Pewter watched with wide, black eyes and occasional melancholy meows. She showed no sign of recognizing us, no sign of trusting us enough to allow us to rescue her.

Speaking gently, Jerry climbed to the ladder’s top step. He reached up and stroked Pewter. Then, gently, slowly, he reached to pick her up. I stood, holding the ladder. We knew our cat might run farther up the tree. She might lash out at Jerry, causing him to lose his balance.

Uttering only a faint protest, Pewter let Jerry pick her up and carry her down . . .

One day, you may cower, moaning, in a place you don’t know how to get out of. I’m not sure whether God uses bungee cords. But I am sure of this: He’s gone to great lengths to help you. He says to you, “I have made you and I will carry you; I will sustain you and I will rescue you.”

You decide whether you will lash out, run or let him carry you to safety.

. . . . . . .

Isaiah 46:4 TNIV

You are not alone!

2009-04-20T09:46:00.006-05:00

Monday morning came. I could not get up. Like a little child who has walked too far and plops down, refusing to go a step further, my body said, “Nope.”

I couldn’t blame exhaustion, nor illness, nor any other physical problem. For no apparent reason, I felt paralyzed.

Fifteen years earlier, a similar paralysis overtook me. My husband and I and our two elementary-age daughters had just moved from Mississippi to Indiana. While selling one house and buying another, we lived temporarily in a two-bedroom apartment.

For months, we faced all the tasks relocating involves. We made all the adjustments relocating involves. We experienced all the emotions relocating involves. We house-hunted, enrolled the girls in school and scouted out everything from a grocery store to a doctor’s office (Amanda got an ear infection two days before school started). Living in cramped quarters, learning a strange new world, we tackled the daily tasks that used to be simple but suddenly proved frustrating and complex.

Those months, I experienced periodic bouts of paralysis. The first time it happened, it frightened me. But each time I yielded to that feeling of “I cannot go another step!” – instead of fighting it – I soon felt replenished enough to get up and go again.

Since then, I’ve learned that relocation overload isn’t the only thing that can trigger paralysis. Other triggers include: fear, depression, feelings of powerlessness or purposelessness and unrelieved stress.

Monday morning, immobilized, I pondered the cause.

When at last I found strength to get out of bed, I made coffee and padded upstairs. Entering my office, I saw several booklets scattered in front of a tall bookcase. Our cat Pewter loves to climb behind the books in our bookshelves and then dislodge the books.

The top booklet in the pile displayed a single red rose and four words in large letters: “You are not alone!”

Reading the words from across the room, I heard God say them to me.

Intrigued, I sat in my rattan chair by the window, sipped coffee and read that booklet. A friend of mine, Pam Whitley, and a friend of hers, Pam Wanzer, had created the booklet four years earlier to help new widows.

“Grief can paralyze,” Pam and Pam wrote.

Monday morning, I wasn’t dealing with widowhood. Yet I realized: Grief had immobilized me.

Over the years, I’ve grieved a number of losses, including several that did not involve death of a loved one. In Indiana, grief over moving hundreds of miles away from family members and lifelong friends contributed to my bouts of paralysis.

Now, I felt mystified – and strangely comforted. I’d experienced a wave of grief strong enough to immobilize me, yet subtle enough that I still didn’t understand it.

Ah but God understood what I did not. To tell me so, he’d used a mischievous cat and a booklet I didn’t think applied to me.

When Pam and Pam quoted Hebrews 13:5-6 (AMP), he spoke again:

“He [God] Himself has said, I will not in any way fail you nor give you up nor leave you without support. [I will] not, [I will] not, [I will] not in any degree leave you helpless nor forsake nor let [you] down (relax My hold on you)! [Assuredly not!] So we take comfort and are encouraged and confidently and boldly say, The Lord is my Helper; I will not be seized with alarm [I will not fear or dread or be terrified].”

In other words, I will conquer paralysis.

“Do the next thing,” Pam and Pam advised.

“You are not alone!”

. . . . . . .

To find most of the text of the booklet, “You Are Not Alone!”, visit Pam Whitley’s singlewivesclub blog.

Kiss the dogs and make them dance

2009-04-02T15:06:00.004-05:00

I sat in the family room at a friend’s house, talking and laughing with several other women. We had prayed fervently that morning. In the process, we’d experienced an invigorating, almost electrifying sense of God’s presence.

Our prayer meeting now adjourned, my friend Tina opened the back door. In ran her black lab puppy, Scamp. Scamp ricocheted around the room, his tongue out, his whole body wagging. “Give us some of your energy, Scamp!” I cried. “Give us some of your energy!”

Sitting on a low couch, I leaned forward to reach for my purse. In that instant, Scamp ricocheted from the far side of the coffee table. His hind feet at my feet, his front feet on my knees, he lunged joyfully – and licked me right on the mouth.

“Scamp!” Tina cried.

Scamp bounded away as suddenly as he had bounded up. “Maybe he was trying to give me some of his energy,” I said.

To my knowledge, I’ve never before kissed a dog. But I did dance with one once.

Three years ago, I sat in the family room at a friend’s house. Pam and I had just attended a conference. It wasn’t your normal sit-and-take-notes conference. We’d experienced an invigorating, almost electrifying sense of God’s presence.

Describing the experience to Pam’s husband Carey, Pam and I weren’t as animated as Scamp – but almost. As we talked, Pam popped a CD into the stereo system. The song, “Days of Elijah,” by Robin Mark, began to play.

“These are the days of Elijah,
Declaring the word of the Lord . . .”

Suddenly, something remarkable happened – something that hasn’t happened in any visit to Pam’s house before or since. Spontaneously, the three of us stood up and started dancing. Within a few measures, Carey and Pam were dancing together. I danced solo.

Delighted by the music and the movement, Pam’s mixed-breed setter Toby bounded over. Large, red and long-haired, Toby doesn’t look a thing like Scamp, yet in his puppyhood Toby had that same boundless energy and whole-dog wag. Determined not to miss out on the action, Toby bounced around barking.

Then, unexpectedly, he reared up on his back legs, put his front paws on my shoulders – and danced with me.

“Georgie Porgie, Puddin' and Pie, Kissed the girls and made them cry,” says the classic nursery rhyme.

Laughing at Scamp, recalling Toby, I thought: If anyone writes a nursery rhyme about me, it may include the line, “Kissed the dogs and made them dance.”

Yet I’m convinced the catalyst in both instances went beyond the combination of a hyperactive dog, a family room and me. The people gathered in both places felt profoundly, divinely energized before the puppies erupted into action. Scamp and Toby entered an already charged atmosphere. Uninhibited, they expressed what we already felt.

How delightful to discover that The Message Bible speaks about such energy.

It announces from God: “The sun of righteousness will dawn on those who honor my name, healing radiating from its wings. You will be bursting with energy, like colts [or puppies?] frisky and frolicking” (Mal. 4:2).

It exclaims: “Oh, the utter extravagance of his work in us who trust him — endless energy, boundless strength! All this energy issues from Christ” (Eph. 1:19-20).

It urges: “Be energetic in your life of salvation, reverent and sensitive before God. That energy is God's energy, an energy deep within you, God himself willing and working at what will give him the most pleasure” (Phil 2:12-13).

Oh, yes! Give us your endless energy, God! Free us to express it!

. . . . . . .

Lyrics and info about “Georgie Peorgie” nursery rhyme at Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgie_Porgie.

All Scriptures quoted from THE MESSAGE: The Bible in Contemporary Language © 2002 by Eugene H. Peterson. All rights reserved.

Palm clues

2009-03-21T14:57:00.002-05:00

Sometimes, God speaks in clues.

He doesn’t say: “Colonel Mustard did it in the parlor with a knife.”

But he does say, in Proverbs 2:3-4, “Cry out for insight and understanding. Search for them as you would for lost money or hidden treasure.”

Recently, I sat on my bed at a conference center in central Florida, crying out for understanding. Notebook in hand, Bible in lap, I prepared for great insights. No profound thoughts came – only the awareness that I sat, looking at a picture of a palm tree. The picture graced the wall opposite my bed. I had seen it, without seeing it, for two days.

Suddenly, I knew in my spirit: God had given me a clue. I can’t explain how you know something in your spirit. It’s as if, deep in your gut, you feel a nudge. Your mind, which considers itself superior to your gut, often ignores the nudge. But if you pursue it, you find yourself on a treasure hunt.

“A palm tree,” I thought. I tried to recall Bible verses about palm trees. None came to mind. I looked up “palm” in the small concordance at the back of my Bible, only to find one verse about the palm of the hand. Making a mental note to explore further later, I let the clue lie.

That night, I left the conference center and drove to the condo in Kissimmee, Florida, that my sister-in-law Linda owns. When I arrived, Linda hugged me and waved me toward a bedroom and bath decorated in a palm tree theme.

Now I saw palm trees everywhere I looked. I triple-underlined my mental note to pursue this clue.

Two days later, back at home, I used my computer concordance to begin a treasure hunt. I discovered that the Deborah of the Old Testament “held court under Deborah's Palm.” Hmm. There, the people of Israel “went to her in matters of justice.”

I also learned that carvings of palm trees adorned the walls of Solomon’s temple, as well as the temple Ezekiel saw in a vision.

Ezekiel stressed how many palm trees he saw. He wrote, “At regular intervals all around the inner and outer sanctuary were carved cherubim and palm trees. . . . They were carved all around the whole temple. From the floor to the area above the entrance, cherubim and palm trees were carved on the wall of the outer sanctuary.”

Deborah the judge sat under a palm tree. Ezekiel the visionary saw palm trees everywhere he looked.

Psalm 92 reveals how you and I can enter into their experiences, and even go beyond them. The psalmist sang words the Amplified version renders this way: “The [uncompromisingly] righteous shall flourish like the palm tree [be long-lived, stately, upright, useful, and fruitful]; . . . . Planted in the house of the Lord . . . [Growing in grace] they shall still bring forth fruit in old age; they shall be full of sap [of spiritual vitality] and [rich in the] verdure [of trust, love, and contentment]. [They are living memorials] to show that the Lord is upright and faithful to His promises; He is my Rock, and there is no unrighteousness in Him.”

Sometimes, God speaks in clues. When he does, he isn’t playing games. He’s inviting us to search for hidden treasure.

The clues lead to the treasure. The clues unlock treasure. The clues reveal him. Finding him, embracing him, we receive what he holds out to us.

Sometimes, God speaks in clues – and waits to see if we will seek.

. . . . . . .

Prov. 2:3-4 NLT.

Deborah. Judges 4:5 from THE MESSAGE: The Bible in Contemporary Language © 2002 by Eugene H. Peterson. All rights reserved.

Ezek. 41:17-20 NIV.

Psalm 92:12-15 AMP.

Jerry-rigged

2009-03-14T14:09:00.003-05:00

Our mailbox died an untimely death. A typical metal mailbox affixed to a 4x4 wooden pole set in a concrete base, it served us well for a year – until the night a woman pulled into our driveway by mistake.

She arrived to attend a party happening next door. Five minutes before she drove up, I stepped onto our elliptical exercise machine. When the front doorbell rang, I groaned. Who would come calling, unannounced, after dark on a weekday? I wondered. I decided not to answer the door.

Half a minute later, I had second thoughts. What if my husband had arrived home from work and, somehow, had misplaced his keys? I stepped off the exerciser and started toward the front door just as Jerry entered through the garage door.

“Did you ring the front doorbell?” I asked.

“No, but someone is parked at the top of our driveway, and I saw three ladies with gifts walking across our yard toward the neighbor’s house,” he said.

Turning toward the door, he announced, “I’d better help the driver back down the driveway.” Our driveway takes an unexpected dogleg at the bottom. Already, we had lost three solar lights to people trying to back out.

Jerry stepped outside to see the woman’s car leave the driveway, smash a solar light, jump the ditch and continue across blacktopped road, grinding loudly. Finally, the car stopped. The woman opened the door. She asked innocently, “What did I do?”

Her bumper had snapped our wooden mailbox pole at its base. Her car had dragged the pole and attached mailbox backward, almost hitting the mailbox of our next-door neighbor opposite the house hosting the party.

The woman promised to pay to have our mailbox replaced. The broken pole could not be re-used, nor could the mangled box. We needed to buy a new mailbox and pole, then hire someone to dig a hole, pour concrete, stand the pole upright in the concrete, let the concrete set and, finally, attach the mailbox to the pole. We could not schedule this project immediately because of subfreezing February temperatures.

Not wanting to visit the post office daily to retrieve mail, Jerry devised an ingenious plan to continue using the old mailbox temporarily. He bought three concrete blocks with holes in them and set them atop each other, the holes slightly offset. He hammered out the dented mailbox.

Next, he and I lifted the broken-off pole holding the hammered-out mailbox. We stood the pole inside the semi-aligned holes of the concrete blocks. Jerry used small pieces of wood to wedge the pole, so it stayed upright.

Since the mailbox door would not shut properly, Jerry attached a bungee cord to the pole, ran it around the mail flag and attached its other end to the mailbox door. He tightened the cord so that, when pulled, the door would open, when released, it would shut.

To jury-rig, or jerry-rig, something is “to rig or assemble for temporary emergency use; improvise.”

In the words of Hebrews 9:10, “It's essentially a temporary arrangement until a complete overhaul could be made” (MSG). In another translation, the same verse says the temporary is “imposed until a time of reformation.”

We enjoyed our Jerry-rigged mailbox for two-and-a-half weeks, until temperatures warmed up enough to have a new one installed.

I’m thrilled my husband had the ingenuity to use concrete blocks and bungee cord to improvise a working mailbox. I’m thrilled we knew when to abandon the temporary and welcome the new and better thing that superseded it.

. . . . . . .
Heb. 9:10 from THE MESSAGE: The Bible in Contemporary Language © 2002 by Eugene H. Peterson. All rights reserved. Heb. 9:10 from New American Standard Updated.

jury-rig. Dictionary.com. The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition. Houghton Mifflin Company, 2004.

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/jury-rig (accessed: February 20, 2009).

The gorilla in the room

2009-03-06T18:01:00.002-06:00

Just before waking on a Sunday morning, I dreamed I attended a party given by a Christian woman I’ve met only once. People chatted in small groups on her spacious, well-manicured lawn.

During the party, I spotted a door that led into a hill. An empty lounge chair sat in front of the door. People stood talking near it. I moved the chair, wove through the people and found the door unlocked. It opened easily.

Once inside, I descended a long flight of wooden steps, then walked down a stark hallway, my footsteps clicking on the bare floors. Reaching a closed door, I opened it.

Before me lay a long room, empty except for a loose weaving of massive ropes near the far end. The ropes dangled from ceiling to floor and intersected in a giant crisscross pattern.

Standing in the doorframe, I peered across the room. A massive black thing dangled from the ropes. The black thing began to climb. “It’s a gorilla!” I shouted.

The gorilla jumped to the floor. Deliberately, it lumbered toward me. I slammed the door and began searching for the latch. To my surprise, the door had three latches. To my dismay, all were flimsy. Securing latch number 1, I wrapped a piece of leather around a nail. Fumbling with latch 2, then 3, I knew: If that gorilla challenged those latches, none would hold.

“There’s a gorilla in here!” I shouted, running down the long hall. A young girl with blonde hair passed me. “I want to see the gorilla,” she said cheerfully. Then, the girl’s blonde mom ran past. I didn’t try to stop the girl, but I did tell her mom, “The door won’t hold that gorilla!”

I bounded up the stairs, shouting, “There’s a gorilla in there!”

Then, I woke up.

You’ve heard of “the elephant in the room”? It’s not a literal elephant. It’s a truth that looms so large, people cannot miss it, yet is so awkward and uncomfortable, people refuse to acknowledge or address it.

I saw the gorilla in the room.

In my dream, the people at the party didn’t intentionally overlook the gorilla. They couldn’t see him because he was kept below the surface. The gorilla stayed in the hidden room with rickety locks until he saw the way out.

FYI: Gorillas are endangered and typically not violent. They have more to fear from humans than humans do from them. However, adult gorillas weigh a lot, and on rare occasions a gorilla has attacked people. When one came my direction, I didn’t wait to see if he came in peace. I ran to warn, not so someone could eliminate the gorilla but so that, when he emerged, people wouldn’t get hurt.

You want to know what else I’ve seen? Truth locked away generations ago is emerging. We, the churched in the US, have stood atop this truth all our lives without seeing it. Now, it rips through doors that cannot hold it. Some run, childlike, toward it. Some flee in terror. Some try desperately to shoot such big, weighty, scary truth. After all, it disrupts our party.

Yet this gorilla can neither be dodged nor shot. “There is nothing concealed that will not be disclosed, or hidden that will not be made known,” says Luke 12:2-3. “What you have said in the dark will be heard in the daylight, and what you have whispered in the ear in the inner rooms will be proclaimed from the roofs.”

In my dream, I saw the gorilla in the room. I ran to announce, “It’s coming out!”

. . . . . . .

Unless otherwise noted, all Scripture quotations are from The Holy Bible, Today’s New International Version™ TNIV ®, Copyright © 2001, 2005 by International Bible Society ®. All rights reserved worldwide.

You too can learn more about gorillas at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorilla, http://www.un.org/works/OLD/environment/animalplanet/gorilla.html, and
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4558461.

Sudoku

2009-02-24T14:35:00.004-06:00

Two months ago, during an eight-hour plane flight, my sister Karen and daughter Megan introduced me to Sudoku. Know this: People who’ve tried Sudoku either love it or hate it.

At first, I hated it. Yet I had lots of time – and no desire to watch the in-flight movie or to read. With both companions sleeping or otherwise engaged, I puzzled over the puzzle Megan had ripped out and handed to me.

A Sudoku puzzle is created from a square grid containing nine rows and nine columns. Heavy black lines separate the grid into nine mini-grids, each with nine boxes arranged in three rows and three columns. A few boxes contain numbers. The rest are empty. You complete the puzzle by filling in all the boxes so that every row, column and mini-grid contains each digit from 1 to 9 only once.

My torn-out page announced, “Skill level – Easy.” Utterly stuck, I told Megan, “This is impossible!”

“Yeah, I was really stumped at first,” she said, “but then something clicked and I began to see how to do it. Don’t guess,” she instructed me. “You have to use logic.”

“Logic,” I told my brain. “Use logic.”

It took awhile – a long while, actually – but I finished that puzzle, then another, and another. Now I have a Sudoku book of my own, with four skill levels: Easy, Medium, Hard . . . and Diabolical. To date, I’ve worked puzzles at every level except Diabolical.

I’ve learned ways to determine what digits a box may or may not contain. I’ve finished some puzzles quickly – labored long over others.

More than once, I’ve thought, “This is impossible!” After strenuous pondering, I could see no way to place even one more digit. But with patience and persistence, taking breaks as needed in order to come back fresh, I’ve finished every puzzle I’ve started.

When stumped, I’ve realized: Moving forward may require discovering the sole move still possible. Once made, that move opens up another, and another, and the rest of the puzzle practically solves itself.

A month ago, I told God, “This is impossible!”

I wasn’t talking about Sudoku puzzles.

God himself has torn a page out of his book, so to speak, and handed it to me. From conception, I’ve held giftings and callings given me, not just to occupy time, but to accomplish something that matters.

You have a similar yet unique page of your own. As Ephesians 2:10 says: “We are God's masterpiece. He has created us anew in Christ Jesus, so that we can do the good things he planned for us long ago” (NLT).

Recently, I’ve learned a lot about who God created me to be and what he created me to do, yet, eager to go forward, I could not find a way. Every step I tried to take proved a dead end. Utterly frustrated, I laid – er, threw – the matter aside. For several days, I sat on the couch, watching TV, working puzzles and crying.

Then, one day, God said to me, “Sudoku.”

Aha. God was speaking in tongues – and I knew the interpretation.

I needed, not to guess, but to see, not by logic, but by his Spirit. I needed to focus, not on all the steps that were currently proving dead ends, but on the one step that lay open for me to take. No matter how small that step seemed, no matter how insignificant, I needed to take it – and then to see and pursue whatever opened up next.

Oh.

I’ve learned to love Sudoku. And now, I’m practicing what my daughter’s puzzles preach.

Mrs. Kamel Jammel

2009-02-20T16:44:00.002-06:00

Mrs. Kamel Jammel wants to donate $2.5 million to me – for Christian purposes, of course. She said so in her email, “Donation from Mrs. Jennifer Kamel.”

I’m so moved by this offer that I must reply publicly. Quotes below are Mrs. Jammel’s – or Mrs. Kamel’s – exact words.

“I am Mrs Jennifer Kamel, from Kuwait. I am married to late Mr Kamel Jammel.” Ah, Jennifer – a Kuwaiti name, if I ever heard one. I can’t decide whether I’m more intrigued by your name or by your late husband’s. His name, Kamel Jammel, makes me laugh out loud. But why, Jennifer Kamel, is his first name your last name?

And why must you introduce yourself to me, since your greeting reads, “Dearest In Christ”? Is it a Kuwaiti custom to call people you’ve never met “dearest”?

I noticed that the “To:” line of your email matches the “From:” line. That is, you sent the email to yourself, with blind copies to who knows how many people. However, you want me to believe that I alone have received your offer to donate this staggering sum. You even threaten – er, suggest: “any delay in your reply will give me room in sourcing another Church for this same purpose.”

What sorrow! Your husband of 18 years, Mr Kamel Jammel, died “after a brief illness that lasted for only five days.” You also lost your only “duaghter (Linda)” – another fine Kuwaiti name – “in a motor accident.” And now your doctor gives you only eight months to live before either your “cancer problem” or your “stroke sickness” takes you out.

So, here you are, stuck with 2.5 million dollars (US) sitting in a General Trust Account in an Ivory Coast bank. You say: “I want this fund to be used in Christain Activities like, Orphanages, Christain schools, and Churches. . . .”

Your husband, Mr. Kamel Jammel, acquired this hefty sum before his death. Did he accrue this fortune through his 26 years of working “with Kuwait Embassy in Ivory Coast”? If so, I want to recommend that job to all my friends.

Ah, Jennifer, don’t you know how many others have already tried this scam? Maybe you do. Maybe you are they (using different name, different story). Maybe you’ve actually had folks respond and, when they sent you their bank account number so you could deposit the millions, you sucked the account dry.

But, Jennifer, why are you targeting Christians? Do you find us more easily deceived – by your duplicity and our greed – than the general population?

You certainly lay it on thick: “The Bible made us to understand that ‘Blessed is the hand that giveth’. I don't have any child that will inherit this money and my husband relatives are not Christians . . . I don't want a situation where this money will be used in an ungodly way.”

Of course. That’s why you’re offering the money to a total stranger.

“I am not afraid of death hence I know where I am going. I know that I am going to be in the bosom of the Lord. . . . . the lord is my shephard. My happiness is that I lived a life of a worthy Christian.”

Dearest Jennifer Kamel, lately Mrs. Kamel Jammel, you may dupe some gullible Christians. But: “Do not be deceived and deluded and misled; God will not allow Himself to be sneered at (scorned, disdained, or mocked by mere pretensions or professions, or by His precepts being set aside.)”

More succinctly: “Don't be misled: No one makes a fool of God.”

. . . . . . .

Gal. 6:7 The Amplified Bible.

How alarming

2009-01-21T12:31:00.002-06:00

Gas logs burned in the fireplace. Our grandfather clock ticked nearby. Rain poured outside. I sat in our overstuffed chair, wrapped in a red throw, reading from Psalms.

What a peaceful setting, I thought.

Suddenly, a deafening thunder clap shattered the serenity. More accurately, three frightening noises erupted in quick succession. The startling BOOM of the thunder sounded almost simultaneously with a loud POP, setting off an ear-splitting alarm.

Jumping up from the chair, I searched the house, wondering if the POP and the alarm signaled a lightning strike. Thankfully, I found no evidence of fire.

Next step: stop the alarm that was piercing me to the core and traumatizing our two cats. Recently, a similar alarm had erupted when smoke detector batteries died. Even after I yanked out the old batteries, the alarm didn’t quit until I bought and inserted replacement batteries.

This time I have replacement batteries! I thought. Locating the batteries and a stepstool, I clambered up to reach the source of the deafening noise, a small white box attached high on a hall wall. As I swung the box open, praying my eardrums would not burst, the noise lessened by roughly half a notch. But my delight in that tiny reprieve quickly turned to dismay. Inside the box I saw no batteries.

Puzzled, I thought, The other smoke detector had batteries. Then, I realized: This was no smoke detector. It was the security system alarm. And I had no clue how make that dreadful noise go away.

Travelling on business, my husband answered his cell phone and advised me how to disarm the system. Didn’t work. The security system handbook offered no help beyond what my husband had suggested. It contained no customer service number.

Tracking down the number of the company that had installed the security system, I talked with the owner. He told me he could not come himself but would send someone in 20 to 30 minutes.

Only later did I learn: The man with whom I talked – the one whose company installed our security system – knows nothing about security systems. Further, the person he assured me would come in half an hour was out of town – and had no intention of driving two hours to accomplish a two-minute task.

That morning, I talked to the company owner three times and his voice mail twice. I also talked with the service man twice. My repeated and increasingly distraught pleas for help met with (a) repeated assurances that someone was coming, and (b) advice as to how to fix the problem myself – measures that either did not work or I had no clue how to do. Finally, the service man offered this thoughtful admonition, “Just go to work, and the noise will stop sooner or later.”

Of course, I work at home in the room directly over the renegade alarm. Further, the battery that needed disconnecting was a 48-hour one.

The good news is: I did not take a hammer to the white box on the hall wall. The bad news is: My cats and I endured that hellish noise for two hours and 48 minutes. Ultimately, my husband called a coworker, who came out on his lunch hour and disarmed the system.

I cannot express how maddening, how tormenting, a shrieking siren that refuses to quit, its shrill, pulsing sound pounding relentlessly, expelling peace, shattering normalcy, destroying the ability to concentrate or to accomplish anything. But I can tell you a greater torment, in words expressed centuries ago by a man named Job.

“I cry out for help, but no one hears me.”

. . . . . . .

Job 19:7 NLT

Dare I say it?

2008-12-31T20:52:00.002-06:00

Why did I feel such – dare I say it – dread?

A trip to Europe with two family members I love, to see another family member I love, should spark anticipation and excitement. Yet I did not feel excited.

Having scheduled the trip for the first week of November, I felt I’d goofed as to timing. Having recruited a sister and daughter to travel with me, I felt inadequate to lead the team.

Daughter Amanda, a fluent French-speaker living in Belgium for a semester, could guide the rest of us around Brussels. Ah, but other aspects of the itinerary intimidated me.

To begin, the three of us planned to depart from different airports and rendezvous in Atlanta. What if, due to a delayed flight, someone missed the overseas connection?

Landing in Paris, we would travel immediately by train to our next destination. With our tickets already purchased, what if we missed the train?

Indeed, we planned to spend lots of time on trains, both within and between cities. Returning by night from Brussels to Paris, luggage in tow, we had to change trains twice, then walk a couple of blocks to the hotel. Afterward, we’d sightsee in Paris for two days, getting place to place by metro with me playing tour guide.

“Karen and Megan are intelligent, resourceful women,” I told myself. “All working together, we’ll do fine.”

Yet, each of their husbands had expressed uneasiness about his wife’s going overseas for a week. “Don’t get separated. Don’t get abducted,” one husband advised.

The instigator of the venture, I felt responsible for us all.

Further, I felt remiss for leaving the country the week of the Presidential election. Even after voting absentee, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was going AWOL. That feeling intensified when a white supremacist group planned a rally in my town the same week.

“How dreadful!” I thought. “I need to stay here and do something!”

The weather forecast for Brussels and Paris promised highs in the 40s, lows in the 30s and rain, rain, rain. Even weather.com seemed to admonish, “Just stay home.”

Feeling silly for feeling such dread, I tried for weeks to ignore my feelings. Finally, I faced them. I listed everything prompting my anxiety. Then I asked, “Lord, what do you want to say to me about this trip?”

Shortly afterward, a friend sent me an e-mail in which she spoke of the trip as a time of “hilarity.” Instantly, that word lodged in my spirit.

The next day, when I mentioned the trip to another friend, she said, “Go enjoy Sabbath.” That admonition also lodged deep within me.

Through two friends who didn’t know about my misgivings, God told me his intentions for our trip. As I received what he said, my feelings changed radically. I drove to the airport expecting hilarity, expecting Sabbath. For the entire eight-day trip, I experienced both.

One night long ago, a boy named Samuel kept thinking he heard Eli the priest calling him. Three times, Samuel acted on what he thought, only to be told Eli hadn’t called. Finally, after Eli suggested the voice might be God’s, Samuel said, “Speak, LORD, for your servant is listening.”

Originally, Samuel’s thoughts weren’t accurate. Yet if Samuel hadn’t acknowledged what he thought, he would have missed hearing God.

Before our trip, my feelings weren’t accurate. Yet if I hadn’t acknowledged my feelings, I would have missed hearing God.

Please don’t wait until you’re going overseas. Whenever implausible thoughts or feelings persist, quit stifling them. Instead, dare to admit them. Dare to ask, “Lord, what do you say about this?”

. . . . . . .

1 Samuel 3:9 NIV

The hilarity blessing

2008-12-12T17:43:00.001-06:00

Two weeks ago, I traveled to Belgium and France. Things couldn’t have gone smoother.

Okay, they could have gone smoother, but not much. Before the trip – hearing that I was traveling with a sister and a daughter to visit another daughter studying abroad – a friend blessed the week with “hilarity.”

Ah, what a blessing! Snags that could have created frustration prompted laughter instead.

We arrived at our hotel our first night in Brussels, more than ready to lie down and sleep. Online, we had reserved a double room for three occupants. Yet, the system showed we’d reserved a king for one.

Facing three exhausted women, the male desk clerk announced, “The reservation is for one.” He insisted he had no empty rooms and ignored our question about a cot. That night, we climbed into a clean, if crowded, bed, giggled, then slept.

The second night, the hotel still had no double rooms available, but the female desk clerk was determined to find a remedy. In this hotel, the king beds consisted of two twins with a common headboard. The helpful clerk sent up a third twin.

A housekeeping lady brought the extra twin. She knocked, then stood in the doorway, staring in stern disbelief at the tiny area where she was supposed to place the bed. Uttering no words but lots of distressed noises, she maneuvered the frame into place. Then she left, returning a few minutes later with the same stern expression and a mattress.

My sister and I were alone in the room at the time, both trying frantically to help in whatever ways we could – rearranging luggage, holding one end of the bedframe, saying “Merci!” repeatedly.

Exiting again, the housekeeper returned a third time, holding linens. As she and I worked together to make the bed, she finally spoke. “Two person – or three person?” she asked. We knew she meant, “Am I doing all this because you two Americans need three twin beds?”

“Three person. Trois. Three,” we assured her six or seven times.

With the third twin fully made, she surveyed our wall-to-wall beds and suddenly broke into a huge grin. After she left, we erupted into laughter, imagining her telling the whole staff about the Americans who wanted three beds in a pea-sized room.

In Brussels and in Paris, we rode the metro everywhere. Apparently, not too many tourists attempt that feat because everyone around us seemed to know exactly where they were going and how to get there. They breezed through mazes of connecting tunnels, hurried up and down stairs, got on and off trains with the confidence and unconcern of people who do so daily. We provided comic relief. As we discussed whether we had taken the right train going the right direction, as we asked dumb questions and tried valiantly to pronounce French words, people smiled covertly.

Exiting one metro station near Notre Dame Cathedral, we entered a café and ate. The lady next to us smiled covertly as we overcame several communication glitches with one waiter. After eating, I approached another waiter, pointed through the window to a tall building, and asked, “Notre Dame?” His face conveying both pity and mirth, he pointed the opposite way and said, “Notre Dame.”

Thousands of years ago, a woman named Sarah sang, “God has blessed me with laughter and all who get the news will laugh with me!”

Looking back on our week, I’m echoing Sarah’s refrain.

We slept well. We found every place we set out to see. We asked for help when needed. Richly blessed with hilarity, we passed it on.

© 2008, Deborah P. Brunt. All rights reserved.

No glace

2008-12-03T07:17:00.005-06:00

Aboard a small jet winging its 53-minute flight from Memphis to Atlanta, a flight attendant quickly served drinks. When she asked the lady next to me, “What would you like?” the distinguished-looking senior adult responded, “Wah-tuh. No glahs.”

Seeing the confusion on the flight attendant’s face, I translated: “No ice.”

“That was going to be my next guess,” the flight attendant said. I smiled, knowing her first thought and picturing her trying to serve, “Water. No glass.”

I smiled too because of the small victory I’d just experienced.

Rewind six months. Feeling more daring than ready, I announced my intention to learn conversational French. Our younger daughter Amanda speaks French fluently. In high school and college, I myself took French. Ah, but a few days – er, decades – have passed since then.

Three months after making my bold announcement, I hadn’t yet acted on it. Amanda pointed me to a language program online that teaches words and phrases. Downloading the “lite” version, I tiptoed into the baby pool of conversational language-learning.

My first word list contained names of 16 animals. Before long, I could say such crucial words as cow (la vache – pronounced “lah vahsh”), cat (le chat – “luh shah”) and bee (l’abeille – whose pronunciation I will not even try to explain). Thus, when my husband and I saw the movie, Wall-E, I pointed excitedly to the robot’s cockroach friend and announced, “Le cafard!”

Two months later, our daughter Megan, my sister Karen and I bought tickets to visit Amanda, studying abroad in Belgium. We planned to travel the first week in November, spending several days each in Brussels and Paris. Part of the time, Amanda would accompany us. Part of the time, we’d be on our own.

The day before departure, I shut down my French language program, feeling rising panic. I knew 325 French words and phrases – more or less. Had I learned the most vital words? When needed, would I recall them? Would I understand anything that an actual French-speaking person said?

One day later, on the first leg of my trip, I sat beside a woman who turned and spoke to the person behind her in a language definitely not English. Summoning my courage, I asked her, “Français?”

“Belgian!” she replied. (Yes, she had spoken French, but wanted to make her country of origin quite clear.)

I said, “Je m’appelle Deborah.” She told me her name, “Nicole.” In French, I told Nicole that I was going to Belgium to visit my daughter who was studying in Brussels. In French, Nicole told me that Brussels in November is very cold. Nicole lives in Brussels. She had come to Memphis with a group of eight. I asked, “Graceland?” She answered, “Oui.”

A few minutes later, she ordered, “Water. No glace” (meaning “ice” and pronounced rather like saying “glass” with a British accent). Amazed, I found myself translating from another language for someone else.

That short flight set the tone for the trip. On an elementary level and with some funny experiences, I actually communicated in a different language. Amazingly, I did it way before I thought I was ready.

Perhaps you’ve set out to attempt something daring, something you believe God is telling you to do. Perhaps you’ve waded in – and found the water getting very deep, very fast. Perhaps a loud voice inside you is shouting, “I’m not ready for this!”

In Hebrews 10:38, God says, “I take no pleasure in the one who shrinks back.” Mais oui! With the Hebrews writer, you and I can answer, “But we are not of those who shrink back . . .”

Hebrews 10:38 TNIV

Check out Byki (Before You Know It) language-learning system at www.byki.com.

Reformation Day

2008-11-21T14:14:00.001-06:00

One of my favorite movies – titled simply, Luther – tells the story of Martin Luther, the sixteenth-century German law student turned Catholic monk turned reformer.

Luther dared to say to the church leaders of his day, “Excuse me, but have you noticed that the way we’re doing things doesn’t match up with who God is and what he says?”

In particular, Luther dealt with the issue of indulgences. When Luther read the Bible (in Latin, the only translation available), he came to believe that “salvation is a free gift of God, received only by true repentance and faith in Jesus as the Messiah.” Meanwhile, the church was selling “indulgences” to raise money to rebuild St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. A church fundraiser sent to Germany kept telling prospective givers, “As soon as the coin in the coffer rings, the soul from purgatory springs.”

At first, Luther expressed his concerns privately. Church leaders responded with the Latin equivalent of, “Quit questioning The Church.”

Luther didn’t want to buck his authorities. But he also didn’t want to ride along behind leaders leading toward a cliff. What’s more, being one of the few who could see the cliff (because he had access to the Bible and could read Latin), he couldn’t in good conscience simply jump to safety while thousands of others followed the leaders over the edge.

So Martin Luther went public. On October 31, 1517, according to one early account, Luther nailed a copy of his “Disputation of Martin Luther on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences” to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg – an act “now seen as sparking the Protestant Reformation, and celebrated every October 31 as Reformation Day.”

Luther’s document contained 95 Theses. How could a nearly 100-point sermon posted on a church door spark a movement that “changed the course of Western civilization”? For one thing, other people of influence saw the wrong direction in which the church was heading. When their combined voices began to speak the truth, many received it. Further, Luther’s list didn’t stay on that church door.

Rather, “The 95 Theses were quickly translated from Latin into German, printed, and widely copied, . . . Within two weeks, the theses had spread throughout Germany; within two months throughout Europe.”

In a nutshell, God blew on that fire and fanned it.

At that point, things got really interesting – and messy, and difficult, and dangerous. Sometimes, people trying to lead the right way did wrong things. Sometimes, they overcorrected. Sometimes, they expressed wrong beliefs. Just read a little of what Luther said about Jews and women, for example, to see that he himself did not get everything right.

Sometimes people with absolute power in the Western church structure made stunning countermoves intended to crush the new movement.

In spite of it all, the impossible happened. With shudders, groans and missteps, through confusion and disarray, the church made a critical course correction. It avoided the cliff God describes in Leviticus 26:23-24: “And if ye will not be reformed by me by these things, but will walk contrary unto me; Then will I also walk contrary unto you, and will punish you yet seven times for your sins” (KJV).

John Eckhardt writes, “Reformation blesses and strengthens the church.” He also writes, “Reformation is unpleasant and controversial but absolutely necessary. The Lord will continue to reform the Church until it is the glorious Church prophesied in the Word of God.”

Regardless when you’re reading this, thank God for Reformation Day. And ask him to grant his church courage to make critical course corrections needed in this Reformation season.

© 2008, Deborah P. Brunt. All rights reserved.

Quoted material referencing Martin Luther above is from “Martin Luther,” Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Luther.

John Eckhardt, Moving in the Apostolic (Ventura, CA: Renew Books), 1999, pp. 72-73, 78.

Under our rug

2008-11-14T17:23:00.003-06:00

One mild October day, I decided to have lunch on our covered back porch. Carrying my tray with peanut butter-and-jelly sandwich and tomato soup to the round patio table, I sat and began eating.

Happily munching, enjoying the peaceful scenery, I watched our cat Pewter at play. When Pewter paraded near the table, I looked down. There underfoot I saw ants.

Our concrete patio was poured in four rectangular sections. Because the patio lies under roof, we bought an inexpensive outdoor rug to adorn a central area where two lounging chairs sit.

Watching the ants, I realized they had made a highway of the center crack running the length of the concrete. I moved my feet away from the crack, leaned over and lifted the edge of the rug. Underneath, hordes of little intruders trekked along the hidden part of the crack.

I had swept the patio two days earlier and had seen no sign of ants. Further, we had contracted with a pest management company to keep the house and its immediate vicinity bug-free. A company rep had recently given the place a thorough treatment. He’d told us to call if we saw any insect-type pests.

The next morning, I called. That evening, another company rep knocked on our door. I took him around to the patio. “Hmm,” he said, as I pulled back the rug and showed him the critters scurrying along the patio’s center line.

Leaning and peering, then straightening up, he said, “I think they’re fire ants.”

Surely not! I thought. How is that possible? I wondered. I’m glad I moved my feet, I decided. “Fire ants?” I said.

The last time we lived in Mississippi – in the northeast section – we battled fire ants. We knew their reputation – aggressive behavior, painful sting.

Imported by accident from South America to Mobile, Alabama, in the early 1930s, they soon took up residence across the 12 southeastern states. In South America they had natural enemies. In the US, they do not.

Previously, fire ants signaled their presence in our yard by building large mounds. If someone dared to kick a mound or bump it with a stick, myriads of ants would suddenly swarm out. Eager to get rid of the venomous creatures, we followed the recommended procedures. Yet each time we thought the problem solved, we found a new mound.

Moving away from Mississippi 14 years ago, I bid a glad farewell to fire ants. Now, 10 months after our return, they’d come out to welcome us home. Yet, how? We had worked in our yard throughout the summer and into the fall. We hadn’t seen one fire ant hill.

The pest management man sprayed the crack in the patio. Then, he inspected the yard. He returned to report, “That mulch you have around your three new trees? You have fire ant beds in two of the three.”

He added, “The ants probably tunneled from their hills to the crack in the concrete under your rug when the night temps dropped below 50 degrees. The rug holds in warmth.”

Ah, ha! Sneaky fire ants! Hiding in our tree mulch and snuggling under our rug!

Jesus never dealt with fire ants. But he did deal with venomous people who hid behind religious masks. He told them, “You can't keep your true self hidden forever; before long you'll be exposed.”

I’m happy to report: Crafty fire ants exposed! Natural enemies or not, they do have an enemy here, with tenacity and new strategies to get these usurpers off our land.

Luke 12:2 from THE MESSAGE: The Bible in Contemporary Language © 2002 by Eugene H. Peterson. All rights reserved.

More info about fire ants at www.fireant.net and www.ars.usda.gov/is/AR/archive/sep99/ant0999.htm.

Wake up, Deborah!

2008-10-31T11:34:00.002-05:00

“Wake up, wake up, Deborah!
Wake up, wake up, break out in song!”

So sang Deborah herself, a prophet and leader in Israel in the days of the Old Testament judges.

Who would have thought, at this late date in life, I’d find myself singing the same refrain, with a strange new confidence and joy? Who would have thought that a character in a local theater production in Mississippi and a wagon bed in North Carolina would contribute to my awakening?

The Deborah of the Old Testament served as a judge for years. Who knows how many people she helped as, one after another, month after month, “the Israelites went up to her to have their disputes decided” (Judges 4:5)? One day, Deborah awoke to a different assignment, an assignment to cooperate with God to deliver all Israel.

Cruelly oppressed for 20 years, the Israelites had at last cried out to the Lord for help. He responded by speaking to Deborah, telling her the strategy for deliverance. Sending for a man named Barak, Deborah gave Barak his marching orders from the Lord. As Deborah and Barak obeyed God, thousands of warriors rose up to join them – and the Lord himself routed their oppressors.

In a different era, on a different continent, I participated in a little theater production of The Miracle Worker, a play about the child Helen Keller, oppressed from infancy by blindness and deafness and by a well-meaning family with no idea how to discipline or teach her. As portrayed in the play, Helen’s father, Captain Arthur Keller, epitomizes the mindset of the Old South.

When Helen’s new teacher, Annie Sullivan, arrives, she and Captain Keller vie over who will carry her suitcase. Annie wants to hold the suitcase herself so she can give Helen a gift it contains. When Captain Keller tries to take the suitcase, Annie says, “I’d like it.” Keller holds on tightly, announcing, “I couldn’t think of it, Miss Sullivan. You’ll find in the south we view women as the flowers of civiliza—” Audiences smile as Annie wins the skirmish.

Audiences laugh out loud as Captain Keller clumsily carries Annie down a ladder after Helen locks her in a second-story bedroom. When Annie says, “I’m perfectly able to go down a ladder under my own—,” Keller interrupts her: “I doubt it, Miss Sullivan.”

Caught up in the drama focusing on Helen and Annie, play-goers find themselves liking Captain Keller, enjoying the laughter his antics provoke and overlooking his condescending attitude toward women.

One mild September day, sitting on a wagon bed in a North Carolina field, I encountered God. For decades I had known him. For decades I had recited Psalm 139:13-14: “For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made.” God came to the wagon bed, not just to remind me of that verse, but to take me back to the place it describes.

From the womb I had accepted dishonor as normal. I had lived with an identity obscured by a culture that still today hides its lack of respect for women behind its gallant shows of respect for women. A likeable culture, it endears itself by laughter – yet often the jokes themselves subtly convey that women aren’t to be taken seriously.

On that wagon bed, God told me what should have been obvious. My Father said, “Your name is Deborah.”

In that instant, I awakened to my identity. I accepted my new assignment.

Now I sing to whoever will hear, “Wake up, wake up! Let God himself tell you your name!”

© 2008, Deborah P. Brunt. All rights reserved.

Wrong number

2008-10-24T17:58:00.001-05:00

You there – yes, you with the initials KB and the penchant for giving my cell phone number to your creditors – you need to hear the song I’ve found. You need to sing it.

For three years, I’ve enjoyed my mobile phone number. However, I haven’t enjoyed getting calls from the folks to whom you owe money.

I said so to the nice man who called yesterday. The phone rang. I answered. Like so many before, the man said your name. Oh, he didn’t know you – just your name.

Such calls tend to come in waves. Just when I think they’ve stopped, they start again. They provide insight into the intimate details of your debt cycle. I can provide nothing to the people trying to contact you, other than the strong suggestion that they delete my phone number from your record.

At first, I thought my cell phone number had belonged to you before I inherited it. Now, I wonder if you picked the number out of the air. I’ve never gotten a call from one of your friends or family members. If I had, I might know how to reach you.

We could talk. It would be like a “reveal your secret pal” meeting. You could get acquainted with the person to whom you’ve given so many “little gifts” of unexpected calls all these years. I could ask you questions.

“How did debt become a way of life for you?” “What about deceit – does it fix anything?” “Do you ever get incredibly tired of repeating the same cycle?” “Do you consider it a game?” “Have any of your creditors ever caught up with you?” “If you could find a way out, would you take it?”

After you answer, I could sing you that song.

Maybe a year ago, I complained to the phone company.

The courteous but unconcerned customer service rep said her company has no way to stop you from repeatedly giving out a wrong phone number which they have assigned to me. My only recourse? Change my phone number.

That solution creates other problems. Further, it may not end my calls from someone else’s creditors. Do you know CM? The two of you live in different states but have something in common. I get calls from CM’s creditors on my landline.

Which brings me back to yesterday’s caller. After I told him, “I’m not KB. I don’t know KB – but I can’t tell you how many calls I’ve gotten from her creditors,” he said, “I’m not a creditor.”

“You’re not?” I asked, astonished.

Apparently, KB, you’ve signed up on a job placement website. There, you listed – not one, but two – wrong phone numbers: my cell number and a non-working number. Maybe you hoped all potential employers would contact you by e-mail. Maybe you wanted me to serve as one of your references, since we’ve become so well-acquainted and all.

Yesterday, when I told the nice man what I knew about you, he seemed very grateful.

Long ago, the poet David “sang to the Lord concerning Cush, a Benjamite.” We don’t know what Cush did. We do know what David sang:

“See that man shoveling day after day,
digging, then concealing, his man-trap
down that lonely stretch of road?
Go back and look again — you'll see him in it headfirst,
legs waving in the breeze.
That's what happens:
mischief backfires . . .”

I bless you with a way out, KB – so that you stop digging your own trap and you too join the refrain:

“I'm thanking God, who makes things right.
I'm singing the fame of heaven-high GOD.”

© 2008 Deborah P. Brunt. All rights reserved.

The Funny Little Mama strikes again

2008-08-13T11:08:00.002-05:00

One week during our daughters’ middle school years, my husband did a dangerous thing. He flew off to Indiana, taking our older daughter with him. This left me alone with Amanda, age 11. The danger? Though posing as a mild-mannered working mom, I could, at a moment’s notice, turn into the Funny Little Mama.

During our girls’ preschool days, I entertained them with fictitious Funny Little Mama stories. This lovely but loopy Mama might to do anything – put green beans on her ice cream, shower with soap but no water, use the bathtub as a bed.

The Mama had a daughter who always set her straight. “Mama, when you’re tired, you sleep lying on the bed, not standing in the closet!” “Mama, you don’t hold the hair dryer by the end where the air blows out!”

Of course, by the time our daughters reached middle school, I didn’t tell such stories any more. Instead, I lived them. Megan and Amanda delighted in describing my escapades to their friends. They cheerfully recounted all the times the Funny Little Mama had driven off with items sitting atop her car – items like a mug of hazelnut coffee, three days’ worth of mail and a pair of Daddy’s shoes. They told how this Mama managed to leave a purse in an Indiana library and car keys in a Kentucky quick-stop.

They told tales of the Funny Little Mama cooking lasagna in an unheated oven – and discovering the mistake after the company arrived. They told about her leaving the oven broiler on a full 24 hours during 110 degree summer heat (a crime known in Oklahoma as attempted arson).

The week Jerry and Megan flew the coup, I determined the Funny Little Mama wouldn’t visit. And she didn’t. Until Amanda and I ate supper on Thursday evening. Then Amanda mentioned a boy in her class named Peter Garriott.

“Garriott! What a wonderful name,” I replied. “It rhymes with chariot and lariat.”

At that moment, the Funny Little Mama interjected a poem made up on the spot:

“There once was a boy named Pete Garriott.”

“Mama, his name is Peter, not Pete.”

“You’re interrupting my poem. There once was a boy named Pete Garriott.
Who sometimes would ride in a chariot.
To the horse he said, ‘Whoa!’ Still, the chariot did go.
So ole Pete stopped that horse with a lariat.”

Friday, Amanda told Peter Garriott, her other classmates and her teacher about the poem. That should have sent the Funny Little Mama packing. Instead, she made up a second verse. Even the challenge of finding more words that rhyme with Garriott didn’t stop her.

“There once was a boy named Pete Garriott
Who loved to annoy his pet parriott
The parriott said, ‘Squawk! I know how to talk!’
Then he chomped on a fresh piece of carriott.”

Amanda repeated this new rhyme to her friends. As a result, I became known in sixth-grade circles as “Amanda’s hyper mom.”

Looking back, I see the crushing stress those days held for a near-menopausal woman with a high-pressure job, traveling husband and two daughters fraught with adolescence.

I tried valiantly to have it all together. I rarely did. But I cannot thank God enough that what could have burst forth as bad temper or gloom often erupted into light-hearted fun.

Like an Ancient Little Mama named Sarah, I could testify: “God has blessed me with laughter and all who get the news will laugh with me!”

Some days, this Funny Little Mama did get angry, did shed tears. But our girls told people, “We laugh a lot at our house.”

© 1999, 2008 Deborah P. Brunt. All rights reserved.

Genesis 21:6 (from THE MESSAGE: The Bible in Contemporary Language
© 2002 by Eugene H. Peterson. All rights reserved.)

Wordslingers

2008-08-07T08:29:00.001-05:00

In TV shows I watched as a kid, gunslingers roamed the wild West. They spent much time twirling and cocking their firearms. They regularly said to one another, "Take ten steps, turn and draw."

They weren’t issuing friendly invitations to play Pictionary. They were issuing challenges to fight. In TV shows, we could always tell the good guy by the white clothes he wore (and somehow managed to keep spotless while roughing it on the open range) and by his speed. Any good guy worth his salt could turn around, pull his gun, cock and fire it faster than any guy wearing black any day.

In the end, the good gunslinger won, and the bad gunslinger died, or limped off into the sunset. Everyone cheered. After all, the bad gunslinger deserved it for being bad, being slow and wearing black (which is way too hot a color for the open range).

Thus, all the bad gunslingers practiced gunslinging for hours on end in hopes that they would get fast enough to turn into good gunslingers before someone said to them, "Take ten steps . . ." They also placed "rush" catalog orders for white western wear.

Sadly, catalog orders in those days went out by stagecoaches, which were often robbed by bad guys who hadn't gotten to the catalog desk to place an order before closing time. And so the gunslinging continued.

Okay, I made up the catalog order part. Actually, the good and bad gunslingers differed in far more substantial ways than clothes. The bad guys terrorized people. They’d as quickly shoot you as greet you. The good guys risked their lives to rescue those oppressed by the bad.

In real life today, wordslingers roam the place where you live. These folks enjoy twirling and cocking their tongues. With well-placed remarks, they're as likely to shoot you as greet you.

Few give warning. They prefer ambush. For example, one day a friend asked me to lunch. I could tell even by phone that she was distressed. When we sat to eat, she showed me a venomous letter she had received three days earlier. Using crude language, it attacked her – for good things she was doing. It slandered her and her family. Not surprisingly, the writer hadn’t signed the letter.

My friend had no opportunity to take ten steps, turn and defend herself. The attack came out of nowhere. Now, she's lying on the ground bleeding while the bad guy walks away. She can't identify the assailant by wardrobe color. Looking into faces of people she works with daily, she has no idea which one carries the loaded gun.

Long before the first gunslinger ever rode the wild West, a man named Doeg gunned down 85 innocent priests with malicious words. As a result, God authorized David the poet-king to issue this warning to wordslingers in Psalm 52:2-5, The Message:

“You scheme catastrophe; your tongue cuts razor-sharp, artisan in lies. You love evil more than good, you call black white. You love malicious gossip, you foul-mouth. God will tear you limb from limb, sweep you up and throw you out, pull you up by the roots from the land of life.”

I know. Those words take me aback too – until, looking into my friend’s face, I see the untold devastation wordslinging wreaks, the people it decimates.

In Psalm 52, God isn’t addressing the propensity we all have to say hurtful words in anger or frustration. He’s giving fair warning, strong warning, that he will champion the victims of those who deliberately and with premeditation use words to destroy.

© 1999, 2008 Deborah P. Brunt. All rights reserved.

Here we go round the mulberry bush

2008-07-22T15:21:00.002-05:00

One Monday morning, a children's song kept playing in my mind. The song floated into my thoughts, not because I felt like singing, but because it described my plight.

With deadlines looming, I needed to write. Instead, I had prepared a gourmet breakfast (of cereal and toaster pastries), cleaned the kitchen, made the bed, washed my face, brushed my teeth and washed a load of clothes. Still needing to shower and dress before sitting down at the computer, I was folding shirts when I found myself humming: “Here we go round the mulberry bush, the mulberry bush, the mulberry bush . . . .”

Children dance happily around imaginary mulberry bushes as they sing this little ditty. Without dancing, we all go round mundane mulberry bushes every day. We tackle chores that demand our attention, sap our time and ever need to be done again.

Having fixed breakfast, I cannot expect that one meal to hold my family for life. Having brushed my teeth, I can't throw away my toothbrush, declaring, “Well, that's finished.” Having washed every stitch of dirty laundry in the house, I can't sell the washer and dryer. Sigh.

How frustrating to keep redoing the same tasks.

How enlightening to discover two phrases that leap out from Romans 8. They announce that creation is “subjected to frustration” because of its “bondage to decay.” Ah, yes: “bondage to decay.” Left to themselves, things naturally devolve into a worse condition.

Every year, my husband and I struggle to maintain a yard nice enough to keep the neighbors from all going together to buy us a privacy fence. Continued work produces a lawn that's passable. But should we decide not to do that upkeep this year, our yard will not evolve into a well-manicured garden. It won't even remain passable. It will quickly yield to overgrowth and weeds.

Bondage to decay produces frustration when we see “emptiness as to results.”

Day after day, we go round and round – maintaining our bodies, our relationships, our financial records, the places we live and work, the stuff we own. Imagine how much time we'd have to get on with life if we never again had to bathe or wash hair or do any other personal upkeep chore.

Ah, but imagine how we'd all look and smell and feel if we stopped doing those things.

Therein lies the rub. We may not make progress when we go round mulberry bushes, but we do get somewhere.

R. S. Duncan, former governor of an English prison built in 1594 has suggested that women prisoners at Wakefield created the song, “Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush,” while walking with their children around a mulberry tree that still lives in the prison yard.

Moms in bondage, subjected to frustration, sang as they circled a tree day after day, clasping their children’s hands. Those moms were accomplishing far more than could be tangibly measured. Yet, surely they longed for the day they could take their children far beyond that circular path.

In a decaying world, mulberry-bush tasks restore order, reestablish cleanliness, rebuke chaos. Yet, they can never fully conquer the decline that overtakes everyone and everything.

Thus, they leave us frustrated, longing for a day when endless cycles of maintenance stop.

Romans 8:21 promises such a day. It announces a moment when “the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God.”

In that moment, all who have walked, clasping the hand of Father God, will run free, circling the mulberry bush no more.

© 1998, 2008 Deborah P. Brunt. All rights reserved.

Rom. 8:20-21 NIV

“frustration,” mataiotes NT:353, from Vine's Expository Dictionary of Biblical Words, Copyright © 1985, Thomas Nelson Publishers.

“Wakefield,” Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wakefield

Green hope

2008-07-16T15:22:00.002-05:00

Ah, green! Returning South after living away for 13-and-a-half years, how I welcome you!

Four of those years, we lived in Indiana. That’s when I discovered something Mississippi and Indiana have in common. Each has a Greenville and a Greenwood.

Further, the two states share this trait with 42 others: All have towns or cities with names beginning “Green.”

As best I can tell from my wanderings around Indiana – and my trusty atlas – the land of the Hoosiers ranks No. 1 in number of Green-named towns. The state has nine: Greenville and Greenwood (the two most-often-chosen “Green” names in the country), Greenfield, Greensboro, Greensburg (also popular nationwide), and (less common but equally interesting) Greencastle, Greendale, Greentown, and Greens Fork.

Rivaling Indiana for the Green title, Ohio boasts eight names. Illinois and Wisconsin tie for third place with seven apiece. Missouri has six. Most other states – including Mississippi – have three or fewer Green names.

I can understand why Nevada and New Mexico have no Green-titled cities. I can guess why the only Green towns in Utah and Wyoming are both called “Green River.” I can picture Green Mountain (in Colorado), Green Valley (in Arizona), Green Pond (in New Jersey), and Green Island (in New York).

But I'm puzzled that the states of the Ohio River Valley – rather than those in the Deep South – claim the bulk of the Green names.

Each year in Indiana, we lived for months with white grass, brown branches and only the dark arms of the evergreens rising to color the picture. Each spring, people trooped back from visits down South, exclaiming, “They already have leaves on the trees!”

Mississippi turns green earlier in spring than Indiana does and stays green later into autumn. So why doesn't Mississippi or Alabama or Georgia have nine or more Green names? Why do Indiana and Ohio and Illinois head the pack?

Maybe a large family named Green settled all across the Midwest. Then again, maybe people in this area appreciate green more than those who see it almost year-round.

Centuries ago, settlers in the Midwest without heated vehicles or centrally heated homes watched eagerly for the coming of the green. Maybe they waited until they thought they’d faint if those new buds didn’t pop out. When the green did arrive, they applauded its magnificence and wrote it into the names of their towns.

What we seldom see, we don’t expect and rarely miss. Thus, realistic desert dwellers don't name their towns Greenfield or Greenleaf. They look for beauty in the sand’s earthy colors and the sky’s brilliant hues.

What's commonplace, we expect, but often taken for granted. People in the north don't generally leap for joy over snow.

But what’s enjoyed – then denied for a season – we count precious. When it’s present, we celebrate. When it’s absent, we watch expectantly for its return. A Midwest town may look like “Brownville” or “Brownwood” six months of the year, yet we still call it the color of life that will one day appear again.

Way back on the third day of creation, “God spoke: ‘Earth, green up! Grow all varieties of seed-bearing plants, Every sort of fruit-bearing tree.’ And there it was. Earth produced green seed-bearing plants, all varieties, And fruit-bearing trees of all sorts. God saw that it was good.”

This summer, regardless the landscape palette where you live, “Oh! May the God of green hope fill you up with joy, fill you up with peace, so that your believing lives, filled with the life-giving energy of the Holy Spirit, will brim over with hope!”

Ah, green! How we welcome you!

© 1997, 2008 Deborah P. Brunt. All rights reserved.

Gen. 1:11-12; Rom. 15:13 (from THE MESSAGE: The Bible in Contemporary Language © 2002 by Eugene H. Peterson. All rights reserved.)

Making nothing out of something

2008-07-09T16:43:00.002-05:00

“I don’t have enough . . . ,” I muttered, naming a certain resource that kept eluding me. It wasn’t the first time I’d mentioned the lack. Secretly, I hoped the Lord would take notice and act, preferably by announcing, “OK, I’ll give you . . .”

But that isn’t what happened. Instead, I was passing through a Bible story on my way to teach it to others. The story, as told by Jesus, concerned 10 servants, all of whom received a set amount of money from their master. At least two of the servants used their money to advantage. One didn’t use his at all. Instead, he laid it away in a piece of cloth.

Consequently, the master took that servant’s money and gave it to another servant who had already doubled his funds. When some called the move unfair, the master said, “I tell you that to everyone who has, more will be given, but as for those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away.”

I mulled that statement awhile. It sounded harsh and unjust, this idea of robbing the have-nots to give to the already-haves. But then I reread the beginning of the story, the part where the master “called ten of his servants and gave them ten minas.”

To start out, each of those servants received the same amount – and a substantial amount, at that – the equivalent of two-and-a-half years’ wages. All heard the master’s instructions: “Put this money to work.” The one who lost out HAD. He had resources, start-up funds, given to be used. Yet, he acted like a have-not.

So did a whole clan of Israelites who lived hundreds of years before Jesus’ birth. Members of this clan approached Joshua, the nation’s leader, saying, “We’re a big clan. We don’t have enough land. Give us more.”

“Yes, you’re a big clan,” Joshua agreed, “and the forested hill country allotted to you is rough terrain. But you have plenty of manpower. You can clear it. And what about all the valley land you own? Many of you can settle there.”

“Don’t you know who lives in that valley?!” clan members cried. “Enemies occupy that land. They have formidable weapons. That valley might as well not belong to us, because we can’t live there.”

Joshua repeated, “You’re a big clan. You’re strong. Get to work and possess what you’ve been given.”

Don’t you hate it when you go to God looking for a handout and he gives you a one-two punch? Don’t you love it when his well-placed blows knock some sense into you?

The servant in Jesus’ story reminds me, “Don’t hide in a hanky what you need to invest now.” The members of Joseph’s clan urge, “Don’t beg for more, while dismissing what you already have.”

The clan and the servant instruct me: Quit saying, “I don’t have enough . . .” Look again at what you do have. See the value of assets you’ve taken for granted. Thank God for them. Ask him to show you creative ways to put those things to use. Then, go for it!

“Go for it?” I respond. “But, but . . . that involves risk.”

Exactly.

The servant had to risk to invest the money. The clan had to risk to possess the land. To avoid risk, both servant and clan made nothing out of something.

In Luke 19:26, The Message, Jesus summed up the matter this way: “Risk your life and get more than you ever dreamed of. Play it safe and end up holding the bag.” #

© 2008 Deborah P. Brunt. All rights reserved.

Luke 19:13, 26 TNIV.
Joshua 17:14-17 – referenced.
Luke 19:26 MSG (from THE MESSAGE: The Bible in Contemporary Language © 2002 by Eugene H. Peterson. All rights reserved.)

Ridiculous to sublime

2008-07-03T07:55:00.001-05:00

Which do I tell first – the sublime or the ridiculous? The walk or the swim?

The swim happened first, so let’s start there.

Three nieces were visiting. My brother-in-law brought them because my sister was working. When I asked the girls what they wanted to do, they answered, “Swim!”

I took them to a pool where I hadn’t gone before, a pool jam-packed with swimmers. This pool has a deep end featuring two tall, curving tube slides.

While the girls alternately tanned and swam, their dad and I sat on lounge chairs and talked. After an hour, with the heat pushing and the slides pulling, I stood and asked my 17-year-old niece Christy, “Want to slide?”

All the other women over voting age lounged decorously or sat sedately poolside, dangling their feet in the water. The average age of sliders appeared to be 6.

Showing great courage – and, perhaps, wanting to see the spectacle of an aunt shooting like a torpedo into the pool – Christy headed for the slide with me in tow. She got her spectacle.

Five times, I stood in line with munchkins. Five times, I climbed platforms that discriminated against adult-sized people. Five times, I launched, feet first, down a winding, water-filled tube and ejected into chlorinated water, nearly somersaulting underneath.

It may have looked ridiculous. But the first time I emerged to see Christy’s smiling face, I cried, “Why should kids have all the fun?”

The walk happened later the same afternoon.

My brother-in-law wanted to explore the woods behind our house, so at dusk we set out – my husband and I, our nieces and their dad.

“Are there ticks in the woods?” 15-year-old Shannon asked.

“I don’t know,” I answered.

Trekking a four-wheeler trail my husband and I discovered in February, we found the trail now overgrown. We followed the still-visible path, winding through tall grasses.

At a fork in the trail, five of us stopped while my husband scouted ahead. That’s when my brother-in-law saw a tick crawling up his pants leg, then a second, then a third. Christy found one on her sock. I saw one, then another, crawling up my jeans.

Now I know the answer to Shannon’s question: Yes.

Suddenly keenly interested in self-exploration, we began flicking ticks off jeans, socks, shoes and shirts. Hastily returning home, we shed our clothes – modestly, of course – took our garments outside, shook them out, then washed them. We also carefully examined our persons.

I ask you: Where is chlorinated water when you need it?

Somehow, Shannon and 12-year-old Brittany escaped with no tick sightings. Between the rest of us, we found more than 25 ticks scurrying across our clothing. Thankfully, none had become attached.

How ridiculous for ticks to abort a lovely evening walk. How sublime to band together to conquer them.

How ridiculous for a grown-up to play on a children’s slide. How sublime to climb upward and whoosh downward, banding together with a young friend to conquer fear of what people will think.

Reminds me of a story in Mark 2: “Four men arrived carrying a paralyzed man on a mat. They couldn't get to Jesus through the crowd, so they dug through the clay roof above his head. Then they lowered the sick man on his mat, right down in front of Jesus.”

How ridiculous for four grown-ups to dig through a roof. How sublime when, forgiven and healed, their friend jumped up and walked away.

You’ve heard of going from the sublime to the ridiculous? Sometimes, conquering what’s attacking and paralyzing you requires going through the ridiculous to get to the sublime. #

© 2008, Deborah P. Brunt. All rights reserved.

Swelled heads and wavy faces

2008-06-26T16:02:00.001-05:00

Years ago, when Daddy and Mama got a new TV, we oohed and aahed over its big screen and state-of-the-art features.

Several months ago, I visited my parents. Walking into the den, I saw their former technological wonder tuned to a show that featured an older lady singing. The lady offered peppy lyrics, a robust voice and endearing facial expressions. Alas, I could not focus on any of those things.

My, what big hair she has! I thought. Why would anyone wear their hair that big? It’s the biggest hair I ever saw.

Beyond BIG, her hair filled the screen.

Only later, when Daddy changed channels, did I realize my error. The issue lay, not with the woman’s choice of hairstyle, but with the TV screen. On every channel, people had huge cone-heads, short bodies and miniscule legs.

This opened up a whole new dimension in TV viewing. It made watching baseball games particularly fascinating. You may have heard that wealth and fame give people the bighead? We saw evidence. Swelled-head pitchers bravely pitched with shrunken arms. Cone-head batters zealously struck with stubby bats. But the real show lay in watching the hitters run, distended heads bouncing, teensy legs churning.

Same with football players. Big-headed, short-armed, practically legless, they vied for passes and handoffs while scurrying – uphill? Yes, on this TV, each football field appeared decidedly bowl-shaped, the lines converging, rather than parallel.

Whether we watched the news, a game show, sports event, movie or series, the distorted picture proved funny for roughly three minutes. Then, it became annoying. Always, it distracted.

Now, my parents have a newer TV in their den. The replacement isn’t as large or state-of-the-art as its predecessor. Yet happily, it presents people, objects and even words on the screen in correct proportion.

My husband and I visited my parents a couple of weeks ago. While Daddy and Jerry watched a ballgame on the replacement TV in the den, I relaxed with Mama in the master bedroom. Flipping on the bedroom TV, we located a Lawrence Welk rerun from the 1950’s. The performers offered us nostalgic songs, lyrical voices and lively instrumentals.

Alas, I could not focus on any of those things because of the ripples rippling across the screen. Old show, defective tape, I thought.

Only later, when we changed channels, did I realize my error. Wherever we turned, people stood still and danced the hula at the same time. Close-up shots showed people’s faces waving like flags.

Most of us care too much about high-def pictures to put up long with ailing TVs. But though we’ll fork out big bucks for clear images, how many of us live week after week, month after month, year after year with a distorted view of reality?

We repeatedly ignore evidence as obvious as cone-headed ballplayers, attesting we do not see people or circumstances, difficulties or blessings, material things or spiritual things, life or death, as they really are. More than annoying, more than distracting, it’s grievous what we miss.

Once, while healing a blind man, Jesus asked him, “Can you see anything now?”

According to Mark 8, the man answered quite honestly: “I see people, but I can’t see them very clearly. They look like trees walking around.”

After “Jesus placed his hands over the man’s eyes again . . . he could see everything clearly.”

Don’t live with a distorted picture of life. Do what a formerly blind man did. Regardless how foolish it feels, stand before the one who can miraculously restore what you’ve learned to live without, and say, “I can’t see clearly.”

© 2008, Deborah P. Brunt. All rights reserved.

Uncommon strategies

2008-06-19T08:29:00.003-05:00

Make-believe carries us places. Books and plays, TV shows and movies transport us into regions and centuries where we cannot otherwise go.

We expect make-believe to whisk us away from reality, offering respite from the daily-ness, the disappointments, the struggles that life relentlessly throws our way. We don’t expect make-believe to offer us uncommon strategies for living real life.

But sometimes it does.

One Sunday afternoon, watching TV with my mom, I saw an old Matlock rerun in which attorney Ben Matlock, played by Andy Griffith, sets out to defend a young man accused of murder. As Matlock enters the courtroom, so does the presiding judge, played by Dick Van Dyke.

We viewers know: The judge committed the murder for which the young man is standing trial.

We think: How impossible to get justice when the person most intent on thwarting justice sits on the bench. How difficult to expose truth when the person most intent on concealing truth appears upright and wields great clout.

In this make-believe story, Matlock does not despair over his seemingly hopeless task. He uses an uncommon strategy to get the judge off the bench and onto the witness stand.

This week, I read Prince Caspian, the second of the Narnia chronicles, also just released in movie version. I won’t give the story away, but here’s a peek: The four children who journeyed to Narnia through an empty wardrobe in the first book find themselves whisked away to the same land again.

There, a dwarf named Trumpkin tells them about a young king Caspian who desperately needs help. After describing the situation, Trumpkin laments, “I suppose I’d better go back to King Caspian and tell him no help has come.”

Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy announce that they have come to help. Trumpkin does not believe four children can provide what Caspian needs. Dismissing their offer, he says, “As it is – we’re awfully fond of children and all that, but just at the moment, in the middle of a war – but I’m sure you understand.”

The children have no great physical strength and no army, yet they offer Caspian something that proves even more valuable: uncommon strategies for victory.

We applaud uncommon strategies in make-believe. In life, however, we look askance at any remedy that seems illogical. Yet, God delights in using uncommon strategies to meet real-life needs.

Once, in the real land of Israel, the men supposed to uphold justice did just the opposite. These men had great authority. In days when “messages from the Lord were very rare, and visions were quite uncommon,” God did what seemed silly and useless: He awoke a boy named Samuel, told the boy his plans and relied on Samuel to tell others (1 Sam. 3).

Ultimately, the unjust leaders died just as God had said – and Samuel, the one who dared to say what he heard God saying, became judge in the land.

On other occasions, God:

planned for a 90-year-old barren woman and a century-old man to birth a nation.
deployed a boy with slingshot to defeat a giant.
led a coward named Gideon and 300 men armed with trumpets, lantersn and empty jars to route innumerable forces from three invading nations.
commissioned 120 people without rank, status or financial clout to change the world.

How many times have you and I dismissed uncommon strategies as make-believe?

If, instead, we’ll look for them wherever this God chooses to reveal them, if we’ll receive them as the help we’ve been seeking, uncommon strategies will carry us places – places we cannot get any other way.

© 2008, Deborah P. Brunt. All rights reserved.

Giving

2008-06-12T09:00:00.001-05:00

My husband suggested doing pizza for lunch. Checking the phone book, he found that a certain pizza chain had a location near us and called to get directions.

The teenager who answered the phone handed off to a woman who provided the details and landmarks we needed.

Easily finding the place, we ate Round One from the pizza buffet. As we stood to return for Round Two, Jerry said to a lady bussing tables, “I called earlier to get directions. Are you the one who gave them to me?”

Perhaps in her 30s, with short, curly, sandy-colored hair, she smiled and responded, “Yes. That was me. Did you find the place all right?”

“Yes,” he said. “I just wanted to say thank you.”

Our meal finished, I sat sipping root beer and contemplating an idea that had just come to mind. “Jerry, what about giving that lady a hundred dollars?”

A light dawned in his eyes. “Oh,” he said. “I’d forgotten. But yes. I think that’s a good idea.”

In 2006, I started a small business with this succinct purpose: “investigate truth, instigate bold living.” Since we relocated in January, I’ve been reestablishing my business in a new state, which has meant lots going out, little coming in.

The last month, I’ve been asking God to release resources from unexpected places, and especially to provide resources so I can give to help meet others’ needs. My husband loves to give and does so generously. I ached to contribute again to such giving.

On Sunday, we visited a church both of us had noticed. Once there, we learned this church had distributed $30,000 to its members the week before, in envelopes containing anywhere from $5 to $500 – with instructions to everyone who received money to give it away, in Jesus’ name.

When the pastor announced that more envelopes would be distributed to those not present the week before, we watched church members stand to receive their envelopes. Then, the pastor said, “Visitors, if you want to participate, stand up.”

I looked at my husband. My eyes said, “Please.” He looked at me, and together we stood. After the church service, settling into our hot car, I unsealed our envelope. It held two 100-dollar bills.

Three days later, Jerry left our table at the pizza place and returned, followed by the sandy-haired server. “Is everything okay?” she asked anxiously.

“Yes!” we both answered. “What’s your name?” I asked. She told us. “We have a surprise for you,” I said. Jerry offered her a 100-dollar bill.

“I can’t accept a hundred dollars,” she said. Jerry said, “This is a gift to you from people who love Jesus.” We explained that the donors belonged to the church we had visited, that we were just delivering the gift. With wonder, she asked, “But God told you to give it to me?”

We nodded. She asked, “Can I hug you?” She said, “I think I’m going to cry.”

“Do you have any special needs this money might help you meet?” Jerry asked.

“Oh, yes!” she said. “My husband had a wreck this week. He’s been off work all week, and we had to replace the car. We found one for $1,600, though.”

She thanked us. We all thanked God.

Now, I’m eagerly watching to see where he wants to place the second $100 and how he will continue to release unexpected resources. I’m eagerly calling:

“Come down to make your name known. . . .
For when you did awesome things that we did not expect,
you came down.”

© 2008, Deborah P. Brunt. All rights reserved.

Foundation issues

2008-06-05T12:17:00.001-05:00

Never have foundations fascinated me – until now, when mounting evidence of faulty ones rivets my attention.

Interesting thing about faulty foundations: While the problem lies at the bottom, the evidence appears at the top. Said another way: If you’re seeing rifts and fissures – in buildings and life, in organizations and relationships – to correct the problem, you must do more than patch the sheetrock. You have to fix the foundation.

Ah, but we love patching.

Patching enables denial. It keeps us from having to admit the problem’s extent. We gain a sense of accomplishment – while avoiding the painful and costly process of identifying and correcting deeper issues. What’s more, patching keeps the appearance neat.

No matter what’s happening under the surface, we want the appearance to remain neat.

Yet, instead of solving the problem, patching compounds the problem. We can hide the truth only so long. Meanwhile, the rifts we’ve carefully covered continue to grow. New fissures appear, as what once held together snaps apart.

When patching fails, do we then get serious about dealing with foundational issues? No. We blame. We love blaming.

Blaming enables denial. It keeps us from having to assume responsibility. We feel exonerated – while evading the painful ordeal of getting to the root of what went wrong. What’s more, blaming keeps our pride intact.

No matter what’s happening under the surface, we want to keep our pride intact.

Yet, instead of solving the problem, blaming compounds the problem. We can deflect the truth only so long. While we point fingers, new damage appears and grows.

When blaming fails, do we finally get serious about fixing the foundation? No. Instead, we loudly proclaim that we intend to get serious. “We’re going to fix this the right way,” we say. “We’re going to do the right thing!” Meanwhile, we continue to find reasons and ways to let the matter slide.

We love stalling. We love pretending to intend to fix things. Yet empty promises can mimic the truth only so long. The clock continues to tick, and the damage continues to mount.

“When the foundations are being destroyed, what can the righteous do?” the poet-king David cried in Psalm 11:3 (NIV). Maybe David had faced all the patching, blaming and stalling he could take.

His question sounds almost like a hand-wringing cry, an everything’s-going-to-collapse-and-there’s-nothing-I-can-do cry.

But the rest of Psalm 11 reveals that David wasn’t asking rhetorically. He was asking strategically. He wasn’t lamenting, “We’re doomed! Nothing can be done to avert disaster!” He was crying for strategy to deal with foundational issues people had denied way too long.

According to the NIV margin, David’s question might be translated, “When the foundations are being destroyed, what is the Righteous One doing?”

The answer? He’s doing plenty. In The Message rendering of verses 4,7, David continued, “He’s in charge, as always, his eyes taking everything in, his eyelids Unblinking, examining Adam's unruly brood inside and out, not missing a thing. . . . GOD's business is putting things right; he loves getting the lines straight, Setting us straight.”

What can we do when evidence of faulty foundations mounts? We can keep patching and blaming and stalling until everything crashes down around us.

We can wring our hands.

Or, desperate, we can seek God’s strategy. We can cry for the Righteous One to show us how to fix the problem from the foundation up. We can actively cooperate as he reveals root issues – humbly admitting the truth and taking each step he indicates.

When we finally pursue the strategy we tried so hard to avoid, we find it sets things straight.

© 2008 Deborah P. Brunt. All rights reserved.

It's French to me

2008-05-29T16:08:00.002-05:00

I sat outside a Starbucks with a view of Pike’s Peak.

Earlier I’d met my sister Judy for lunch at her workplace, the International Bible Society headquarters in Colorado Springs. While waiting for Judy in the small bookstore/lobby, I found a French New Testament for sale.

Opening the pages and scanning a few verses, I actually recognized several words. By the time Judy arrived, I’d decided to purchase.

Our younger daughter speaks French fluently. Thirty-five years ago, I took French in college. Last year, I enrolled in a seven-week conversational French course. The class provided just enough information to frustrate me – and to entice me to learn more.

In the months after, enticement got buried under a pile of daily responsibilities and activities.
Sitting alone outside Starbucks, I drank iced mocha, enjoyed the sunshine, admired the snow-laced peak and thought about French. Now the proud owner of a new French testament (which, with Judy’s discount, cost me exactly 82 cents), I revisited the idea of taking a course that might help me actually read my New Testament and converse in French with my daughter.

The idea, like the mountain, intimidated me almost as much as it interested me. It smacked of adventure, accomplishment and conquest.

“Am I up to it?” I wondered.

Other days, observing people instead of peaks, I’ve noticed a recurring theme, particularly among women in my age range. Generally, this theme has nothing to do with French. It has everything to do with reawakened dreams.

Many, in their youth, longed to develop a certain skill, follow a certain interest, pursue a certain path. Then life intervened. Often, “life” included taking care of others and launching them toward their dreams.

Now, these women find their own dreams reawakening. But they wonder, “If I couldn’t get there when 25, how can I possibly meet the challenge at 45 or 55 or 65?”

Facing French, I have an advantage I didn’t have three years ago: vigor, arising from a growing awareness of who I am and a growing confirmation from others that I’m seeing accurately.

If you’d asked me at 25, I’d have told you quite confidently who I was and where I was going. Not knowing my view was skewed, I spent the next quarter century slamming into brick walls.
Just a few head-on collisions with rock-hard walls can shatter our confidence and our dreams. Reeling, we may take one of two paths. Either we keep attempting the same things – with the same devastating results – or, defeated, we snuff the dream and settle for staying where we cannot get beyond.

At my most shattered, I discovered another option: a gate leading out of walls I’d kept crashing into. Beyond the walls, I found a world I didn’t know existed. Beyond the walls, I’m finding me.

Once a man named Samson had a skewed view of himself. As a result, he entered walls he had no business entering. His enemies surrounded the walls, plotting to kill him at daybreak. At midnight, Samson “went out to the city gates and lifted them, with the two gateposts, right out of the ground. He put them on his shoulders and carried them to the top of the mountain across from Hebron!” (Judg. 16:3 TLB).

While I sat gazing on a different mountain, music played over a loudspeaker. Suddenly, a female singer began singing in French.

Laughing aloud, I decided: C’est possible!

As we step into our God-given identity, intimidation no longer hems us in. Barreling past it – carrying the gates, if necessary – we go places we’ve longed to go but never before could.

© 2008, Deborah P. Brunt. All rights reserved.

Woman reading

2008-05-21T20:03:00.001-05:00

It felt decadent. It felt grand.

I sat crossways in my rattan chair, legs hanging over the chair’s left arm, feet propped on the windowsill. With the window raised, the breeze tickled my toes. The afternoon sun warmed them.

Most of the day, I’d sat reading. Turning each page, starting each chapter, I faced a mini-skirmish within. “Get up and do something!” the antagonist demanded.

“I am doing something,” came the insistent reply.

“If only an artist would happen by,” I thought. “Then I could pose in reading mode, and the antagonist within me would relax.” When you’re suitably employed as a model, you’re not wasting time.

The pose-for-a-painter idea – brilliant, if improbable, since the rattan chair sits in an upstairs home office – came from my 2008 engagement calendar, The Reading Woman, published by Pomegranate Communications. This lovely calendar dedicates entire pages to reproductions of paintings and quotations from books – all portraying women reading.

Authors as varied as Shakespeare, Ezra Pound, Eleanor Roosevelt and the French mystic Madame Guyon weigh in. Other quotes spring from such familiar works as Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, and Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.

Eudora Welty writes: “She read Dickens in the spirit in which she would have eloped with him.” Kylie Tennant announces: “She would read anything from a dictionary to a treatise on turnips. Print fascinated her, dazed her, made her good for nothing.”

Ah, but the paintings intrigue me most. A sampling of titles doesn’t begin to convey the variety of women, poses and artistic styles rendered: Reading, Woman Reading, Young Girl Reading, Woman Reading a Letter, Woman Reading in a Sunlit Room, Woman Reading by Candlelight, By Lamplight, At the Window, Reading on the Terrace, Two Women Reading in an Interior, The Reader, The Reader Crowned with Flowers – and my personal favorite: A Woman Reading near a Goldfish Tank.

The distinguished artists who painted these works were English, Scottish, Danish, French, German, Dutch, Belgian, Swiss, Italian, Austrian, Australian, Russian and Ukrainian. How interesting that so many artists hailing from such different places and periods found so much delight in capturing on canvas a woman reading. How telling that none of the artists lives today.

With the bulk of the works more than a century old, the latest was painted in 1939 by Australian Gwendolyn Grant. Titled Winter Sunshine, it pictures a young blonde woman in sunsuit reading outdoors.

Every stroke, every picture illustrates a quote attributed to Henry Miller: “We should read to give our souls a chance to luxuriate.”

Luxuriate. Sounds decadent, doesn’t it?

Maybe that’s why contemporary US artists have trouble catching contemporary US women reading.

The day I did so, my antagonist within repeatedly reminded me of the rules: Reading, if done at all, should be relegated to waiting times in doctor’s offices, school parking lots and beauty shops – or to the moments just before you nod off, exhausted, to sleep.

I had other things to do that day – yet could not do them. I needed to break some rules.

Romans 12:2, The Message, urges, “Don't become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You'll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what he wants from you, and quickly respond to it.”

Pressed in spirit, I knew God wanted me to spend the day doing what my cultural bias labeled “Good for Nothing.” I needed what Edmund Leighton identified in the title of his painting of a woman reading in an English garden: Sweet Solitude.

And thus did I luxuriate. #

© 2008, Deborah P. Brunt. All rights reserved.

Flatter 'n a flitter

2008-05-15T07:31:00.002-05:00

Granddaddy coined the phrase. His voice solemn, his eyes twinkling, he’d say, “Anyone I catch sitting in my chair, I’ll mash flatter ‘n a flitter.”

We grandchildren didn’t know how flat a flitter was, nor indeed what a flitter was. If guessing, I’d have said a flitter resembles a cartoon character smashed paper thin by a suddenly opened door or large dropped object.

According to Dictionary.com, I had the right idea. In the Southern vernacular, the noun flitter can mean “a fritter or pancake.” Ages ago, the prophet Hosea described a flitter when he wrote, “Ephraim is a flat cake not turned over” (Hos. 7:8 NIV).

Regardless, we grandchildren sat in granddaddy’s chair, alternately giggling and screaming, as he hurried across the room and pretended to flatten us.

I hadn’t thought about the phrase in years. Then, two recent incidents brought Granddaddy’s words to mind. Traveling Highway 78 across Mississippi with our daughter Amanda one night, I hit a short, thin piece of wood. Not seeing the board until just before my front drivers’ side tire ran over it, I had no opportunity to swerve.

Immediately, I began checking the tire pressure indicator on my car’s dash. Thankfully, all tires showed equal pressure for the remaining hour of my trip.

The next morning, Amanda and I got into my car, intending to head out shopping. Immediately, a warning light and insistent ding alerted us that the front drivers’ side tire was low. Getting out to look, we confirmed the report. Ultimately, we went shopping in my husband’s car while he took the deflated tire to be fixed.

Three weeks later, my sister Karen was driving across Mississippi, taking primarily four-lane highways. On the one 50-mile stretch of two-lane road, she had a flat tire.

Thankfully, the tire didn’t blow. Instead, deflating, it made a noise like a helicopter. Hearing the noise, Karen saw flashing lights in her rearview mirror. A young man in a white truck behind her was signaling a warning. Then, she felt the rear drivers’ side tire go flat.

As she pulled off the road, the young man passed her, turned into a driveway and walked back. Before she could say, “Flatter ‘n a flitter,” he changed her tire. She tried to pay him. He refused. She asked his name. He wouldn’t say. “Just count this as my good deed for the day,” he said.

“Oh, I think this counts for the next week or two,” Karen quipped.

Flat tires, flat cakes and flattened people have this in common: The air has gone out of them. Rescuing angels – including young men in white trucks and husbands – revive what has deflated or, that failing, replace it.

Alas, my sister’s tire could not be revived. We’re planning an appropriate funeral.

Interestingly, in the Old and New Testaments, the words translated spirit also mean air or breath. Thus, a person “crushed in spirit” has, in the Southern vernacular, been “mashed flatter ‘n a flitter.”

Even the most helpful of people cannot always revive those who’ve been crushed and deflated, yet scripture insists there is someone who can.

If you’ve had the wind knocked out of you, if you’re feeling about as worthless as a half-cooked pancake, I have a message for you “from the high and towering God, who lives in Eternity, whose name is Holy.” He wants you to know: “I live in the high and holy places, but also with the low-spirited, the spirit-crushed, And what I do is put new spirit in them, get them up and on their feet again” (Isa. 57:15 MSG).

© 2008 Deborah P. Brunt. All rights reserved.

Tunnel ahead

2008-05-07T21:37:00.001-05:00

You're driving along a mountain highway on a cloudless day. You round a curve and see this sign: Turn on Headlights, Tunnel Ahead. Two minutes later, you enter the tunnel.

The sun was shining before you entered the darkness. It will still be shining when you exit. Inside the tunnel, your eyes tell you the sun has stopped shining. Don’t believe them. The sun continues shining the whole time you're passing through darkness: you just can't see it.

You may not like driving in the dark, but you must keep pressing forward to get to your destination. You realize the folly of trying to turn around or back up in a tunnel.

If the tunnel is long, you may begin to wonder whether it ever ends. It does. But if you get discouraged, stop, turn off the engine and wait, you’ll never reach the daylight – and an unsuspecting driver will probably rear-end you.

To see the sun again, you must keep your seat behind the wheel while your car continues to move forward. Your headlights must continue to function. If your headlights go out or if you begin feeling claustrophobic and try to jump from the car, you're in serious trouble.

All road trips aside, you may be driving along in the sunshine. Your skies have few clouds. You can easily see the light and feel the warmth of God's love.

Then, abruptly, you enter a tunnel. Suddenly in the dark, you have no idea how far to the other end. If the light doesn’t reappear quickly, you may wonder if the tunnel has another end. Much as you might wish to do so, you cannot turn around or back up.

You don't like driving in darkness. The deeper it gets, the longer it lasts, the less you can feel God’s love.

In the days before people drove anywhere, a prophet named Jeremiah went through a long, dark tunnel time. In the midst of it, he wrote: “There's one other thing I remember, and remembering, I keep a grip on hope: GOD's loyal love couldn't have run out, his merciful love couldn't have dried up. They're created new every morning. How great your faithfulness! I'm sticking with GOD (I say it over and over). He's all I've got left” (Lam 3:21-24 MSG).

In the tunnel, Jeremiah kept reminding himself, “The sun of God's love still shines!” – though for the life of him, the prophet could not see it or feel its effects.

Jeremiah believed he would one day move out of the tunnel into the full glow of sunlight again, and he recognized the secret to getting there. Jeremiah declared, “GOD proves to be good to the man who passionately waits, to the woman who diligently seeks” (Lam 3:25 MSG).

In your tunnel times, remember this: Be still . . . and keep moving. Instead of trying to bolt and run, “passionately wait” on the Lord, sitting tight like a driver behind the wheel. Even when you cannot see it or feel it, know that once you’re in Christ, nothing can separate you from his love.

While resting in the Lord, resist the urge to park. Your destination lies on the far side of the tunnel. Keep your foot on the accelerator, your hands on the wheel and “diligently seek” to go through to the other side.

Be still; keep moving. Passionately wait; diligently seek. From the moment you see a sign, “Tunnel Ahead,” those twin headlights will keep you on track till you break out into the sunlight again.

© 1994, 2008 Deborah P. Brunt. All rights reserved.

Exploring

2008-05-02T12:54:00.001-05:00

Every kid ought to have woods to explore – every adult too.

Three months ago, when my husband and I moved to a new home, we got woods.

For several weeks, whenever heading out walking, I stuck to the streets. That provided enough scenery, I told myself. Sure, the neighborhood promotional materials boasted walking trails, but the one trail I saw veered off the street, around a small lake and disappeared into the wild.

Passing the trail, I looked longingly but didn’t go there until the day my adventurer husband suggested we walk it together. In his boyhood, he had woods. Now, he heard again, too strong to deny, a call to explore.

We set out walking along the road, then turned onto the trail – a wide, graveled, four-wheeler path. A low iron gate barred larger vehicles from entering. Stepping over the gate, we trekked past two small lakes, the second lake hidden from the main road. Visions of fishing excursions danced in my husband’s head.

Curving, the path took us behind the main row of houses in the neighborhood. Looking one way, we saw back yards of relatively new houses. Looking the other way, we saw wilderness. Eventually, we also saw a green metal building sitting far from a paved road. A sign advertised the building as a motorcycle repair shop. Near it, sat a wooden, one-story house with front porch – perhaps 1940’s vintage.

Just past a second gate, we stepped onto a narrow, paved trail that made an oblong loop through a field, taking us close to a main road before curving back around to the second gate.

Returning the way we had come, we noticed where secondary paths meandered away from the four-wheeler trail and determined to explore those paths another day.

Two weeks later, we explored again, this time cross-country. Our house sits on a hill. The back yard slopes down to a ravine where a little creek runs and woods begin. Beyond the ravine, the land slopes sharply uphill again.

On a Saturday morning, I decided to pick up trash that had blown into the ravine. My husband said, “What if I come too, and we go see what’s over the rise?”

Brunt and Brunt doesn’t carry quite the same ring as Lewis and Clark. Yet, we felt just as much explorers as they. Fording the creek, walking under tall, leafless trees, climbing past fallen trunks, low entangling branches and vines that hadn’t yet budded, we topped the ridge. Another four-wheeler trail ran along its far side.

We walked the trail in both directions until stopped by water holes too large to cross. Then, we returned home, picking our way back down the hill, crossing the ravine and promising ourselves we would return another day to explore further.

Only later did I read the words God spoke after Abraham moved to a new place: “Take a walk in every direction and explore the new possessions I am giving you” (Gen. 13:17 NLT).

Only later did I read the call to a different kind of exploring in Galatians 6:4, The Message: “Make a careful exploration of who you are and the work you have been given, and then sink yourself into that.”

How satisfying to explore the new place we live! How deeply enjoyable to gain perspective, to discover together much we otherwise would have missed.

How wild – at my age – to hear a call, too strong to deny, to explore who I am. Eager, yet afraid to go there, I hesitate, until he who created me says, “What if I go with you?”

© 2008, Deborah P. Brunt. All rights reserved.

Walking like an Egyptian

2008-04-24T08:53:00.003-05:00

I had many expectations when I left for Egypt last August. A semester in the Middle East amidst a completely different culture promises many adventures: meeting new people, learning a new language and way of life, bartering for everything from souvenirs to cucumbers. Surprisingly, though, one of my greatest accomplishments while living in Cairo would simply be learning how to cross the street.

My textbooks refer to this region as the Cradle of Civilization. In its present state, the country famous for its centuries of advancements is a bit sad, considering. Cairo is a huge, sprawling city: originally planned to hold two million people, it houses ten times that. The smog is horrid; residents habituate themselves to the smoky haze constantly covering the city, and I suffered from a two-month long “smoker’s cough” due solely to Cairo’s pollution.

Some might deem the place uncivilized, simply because of the missing crosswalks, broken-up sidewalks and garbage-filled streets. That’s right; in a city of 20 million, there are no crosswalks to be found.

One of the first lessons I learned after arriving in Cairo my peers and I like to call “walking like an Egyptian.” This activity has nothing to do with the hieroglyphic-type poses and head bobbing one might associate with a Cleopatra music video, but a more serious and possibly life-threatening activity: crossing the street.

Considering that most main streets in Cairo are marked as eight lanes wide, and Egyptian drivers create up to twice that many lanes, crossing the street is quite hazardous – especially for naïve Americans unaware of Egyptian street-crossing etiquette. We eventually learned the basics to crossing the streets, but even with this knowledge we found ourselves waiting ten minutes just to find the first clear lane!

Thanks to some expert guidance by our interns, we discovered the foolproof way of getting across without waiting half an hour for a clear road: find a nearby Egyptian also waiting to cross and follow his lead. Miraculously, the street seemed to open up before the locals, like the Red Sea before Moses’ staff. If they made it halfway across and then encountered unending traffic, they simply stood in the middle of a lane, waiting for another break in traffic. Egyptian drivers, accustomed to this strange phenomenon, simply swerved around the pedestrians and continued on their way. Scared to death but determined to cross, we trusted our own safety to random Egyptians who pitied us, showing us a way.

Since my arrival home three months ago, re-adjustment to life in the wealthy and consumer-driven States has proven slow and complicated at times. The journey home – extended to 80 hours by missed flights and weather delays – the subsequent adaptation to American culture and the process of learning which direction to go next have reminded me of crossing the street, Egyptian style.

From where I stand, it seems impossible to make it across all those lines of traffic with no guide or light, but slowly and surely I put one step in front of the other, sometimes hesitating as another obstacle passes, sometimes sprinting to the median. Scared to death but determined to cross, I find all the complicated and unconventional process is worth it when I put my trust in the Lord, a knowing and righteous guide even through the most hazardous of places:

“And the Lord will . . . make a way to cross on foot. Surely God is my salvation; I will trust, and will not be afraid” (Isa. 11:1, 12:2 NRSV).

© 2008, Amanda K. Brunt. All rights reserved.

. . . . . . .

Amanda K. Brunt is the daughter of regular Perspective columnist,

Deborah P. Brunt.

Solid ground

2008-04-17T17:49:00.002-05:00

Every time I stick my little toe into the subject of politics, I get sucked neck-deep into quicksand.

The day I voted in the Mississippi primary, I exited the polling place to find a tall young man approaching me. Naming a local radio station, he said, “May I ask you a few questions about how you voted?”

Someone using my mouth answered, “Yes.”

“What are you doing?” an inner voice screamed. “Don’t you know that’s quicksand you’re stepping into?”

Warring inwardly, I said my real name aloud into a tape recorder.

“What is the main issue that influences how you vote?” the young man asked.

The word integrity leapt to mind. I pushed it aside. Such a trite word. So overused, so under-lived by candidates of every stripe. Maybe the ancient Proverbs writer had just exited a polling place when he wrote, “Many a man proclaims his own loving-kindness and goodness, but a faithful man who can find?”

“Name a real issue, not a cheesy one,” my inner voice ordered. “Integrity,” my mouth said.

The young man with the tape recorder gave me plenty of room to try to explain. Then, he asked, “Who did you vote for in the presidential race?” My second response, coupled with the first, painted me into a stereotypical box. Not ashamed of my choice, I did not fit the mold this media interview was pouring around me, either.

“Do you attend church regularly and, if so, did that affect the way you voted?” the young man asked.

“What an interesting choice of words,” I answered. “Yes, I attend church. But more important, I know Jesus Christ personally and that relationship affects every aspect of my life.”

Loving Jesus fiercely, and not wanting to paint him into any boxes, I added, “You know, Jesus Christ isn’t a Democrat or a Republican. As best I can, with all the media hype, I try to understand which candidates have the most integrity, which are truly trustworthy, and vote for them.”

Remember the old Tarzan movies? In those movies, someone always stepped off into quicksand. When they did, the camera always showed a shot of the person almost completely submerged, with head back, face turned upward. The mouth went under last.

“That’s an interesting perspective,” the young man said. The way he said “interesting,” he might have said “dumb.” Christian or not, practical people pick candidates one of three ways:

Vote their chosen party.
Vote for candidates with whom they agree on certain key issues.
Say eeny-meeny-miny-moe.

Seeking integrity proves “interesting” because:

The person of integrity might not agree with you on all the issues.

Integrity can be mimicked. Just ask New York’s Governor Spitzer, who funded a prostitution ring while supposedly ridding the land of prostitution.

A trustworthy politician, who can find? Saying eeny-meeny-miny-moe will probably get you better results.

Sometimes, in the Tarzan movies, the person sank. Sometimes, Tarzan reached down at the last moment and pulled the sinker to safety.

I exited the interview feeling sunk. Then, God reached down and grabbed me with these words from Proverbs 8, The Message: “The Fear-of-GOD means hating Evil, whose ways I hate with a passion — pride and arrogance and crooked talk. Good counsel and common sense are my characteristics; I am both Insight and the Virtue to live it out. With my help, leaders rule, and lawmakers legislate fairly; With my help, governors govern, along with all in legitimate authority. I love those who love me; those who look for me find me.”

Now on solid ground, I’m still looking for integrity.

© 2008 Deborah P. Brunt. All rights reserved.

Plan B

2008-04-10T13:01:00.002-05:00

New seasons have a way of chewing up and spitting out normal schedules.

Naively, you think, “This afternoon, I will . . .” Likely as not, you won’t. While you’re trying to carry on as usual, do not marvel if something wholly unknown to last season’s routine interrupts your plans.

To navigate new seasons, expect interruptions; refuse diversions.

Today, my plans went awry early. Expecting to spend the day working in my home office, I donned a warm-up suit and headed upstairs. Immediately, my e-mail presented opportunities I hadn’t anticipated. This should have delighted me. Instead, it stressed me. Deciding which opportunities to pursue took time. Acting on what I decided took even longer.

Then, a project I’d anticipated completing in an hour took two. Near noon, I still hadn’t started the main task planned for the day. The phone rang. A caller from a government office told me she had received certain business paperwork I’d sent. I had correctly filled out one form – but had failed to include a second required form.

Before mailing the paperwork, I’d called a financial advisor and the government office itself to confirm what to send. Neither had mentioned a second form. The caller invited me to drive to her office to complete the paperwork. When the government invites, I generally accept.

As I changed out of warm-ups, my husband popped in. Discovering my new afternoon plan, he asked me to handle another business matter at a second government office. Innocently, he thought the two offices could be found in the same building. No. The offices are located in two different towns, neither of them the town where we live. However, I accepted the second errand, knowing that town lay en route to the other.

Thus, I spent the afternoon making a 90-mile round trip, enhanced by various trip-lengthening experiences:

I missed an exit and went six miles out of my way.
A phone call introduced a third matter I had to stop and handle.
Lowered signal arms at a railroad crossing halted traffic on one town's main street for roughly 10 minutes. Why the arms lowered, I know not. We saw no train.

Even before the phone call that sent me cross country, I was fuming over the interruptions diverting me from my original plan for the day.

Ah, but somewhere between the missed exit and the railroad crossing, I realized: By accepting interruptions, I had sidestepped diversions. I could have refused “distractions” and continued with my intended schedule.

Plan A felt comfortable and familiar. Plan B felt arduous and tedious. But the interruptions did not take me around the mulberry bush. Each project, each errand, took me forward into new territory. The normal routine created the diversion that could have kept me from the best.

Long ago, a woman named Deborah sang a victory song because her people let a major interruption shatter their schedules. Abandoning their routines, they followed Deborah and a man named Barak into battle. Embracing the arduous, they saw miracles, won freedom from oppression and entered a 40-year season of peace.

Yet a tribe called the Reubenites missed out on the victory. Judges 5:16, The Message, laments, “Diverted and distracted, Reuben's divisions couldn't make up their minds.”

Some interruptions side-track us; those, we need to sidestep. But many times we let the routine divert and distract us from the tedious, arduous business of pressing forward into the new. Waiting at a railroad crossing, I made up my mind: Expect interruptions; refuse diversions.

© 2008, Deborah P. Brunt. All rights reserved.

Jingle bricks

2008-04-03T11:22:00.001-05:00

“Jingle bricks, jingle bricks,
Jingle all the way.
Oh what fun it is to drive
My Caliber today-ay.”

I know. You’re thinking I have a hit single on my hands. But this song just emerged.

My husband started the brick rolling. He came home midday to pick up some papers. Driving back to work, he saw bricks lying streetside in front of a house being built near ours. A scavenger at heart, he stopped and asked the crew foreman, “May I have a few of these?”

“You can have them all,” the foreman answered.

Visions of cool brick projects danced in my husband’s head. Short on time, he picked up some bricks – 24, to be exact – brought them home and unloaded them in the grass near our garage. “If you want,” he told me, “you could drive down there this afternoon and get the rest of the bricks. They’re going to throw them away at the end of the day.”

One, two, buckle my shoe;
Three, four, shut the door;
Five, six, pick up – bricks!
Seven, eight, lay them straight.

That rhyme also emerged, as I opened the tailgate of my Dodge Caliber near a pile of red-brown bricks. Picking up two bricks at a time, neatly placing two layers of bricks in my vehicle’s back end, I felt like a cross between a homeless person plundering a garbage bin and a child stacking blocks.

Visions danced in my head, too – visions of bricks piled randomly in our side yard until the day brick projects materialized. Having errands to run, I took the bricks with me, thinking they could lie neatly in my car until I found a suitable spot to store them and time and energy to put them there.

Ah, but the bricks did not come neatly. Nor did they come quietly. Instead, they jingled like Christmas bells. Whenever I turned corners, they thudded like Santa landing rooftop. It being February, I did not say, “Ho ho ho.” I tried to maintain my composure amid incessant and annoying jingling punctuated by abrupt and violent thuds.

As soon as possible, I stopped to investigate, opening the tailgate curiously, cautiously. Thankfully, toppling bricks had done no visible damage while thudding around in my vehicle. Mysteriously, the jingle-bell noise seemed to have no other source than the bricks themselves. I found nothing metallic that might be bumping against the bricks or itself rattling or shaking.

Abandoning my errands, I drove home, jingling all the way. I backed the car into the driveway, opened the tailgate and spent the next hour hauling 60 bricks, two by two, from the back of my car to a discreet location behind the house and relocating in like manner the 24 bricks my husband had deposited on the grass beside the garage.

Amazing how a little distress goaded me into action, completely rearranging my priorities, producing time, energy and insight for a task I previously had no inclination to tackle.

Once a man named Paul wrote a letter that distressed its recipients. Later, Paul wrote in 2 Corinthians 7:9, “Now I’m glad – not that you were upset, but that you were jarred into turning things around. . . .The result was all gain, no loss” (MSG).

If something is creating distress and havoc in your life, why not let that distress spur you to action? Let it jar you into turning things around.

Instead of stewing, try singing:
“Jingle bricks, jingle bricks,
Jingle all the way.
Oh what fun it is to leap
To action in this way.”

© 2008, Deborah P. Brunt. All rights reserved.

New wine, old vacuums

2008-03-26T18:10:00.001-05:00

It wasn’t broken.

The vacuum we bought a decade ago long outlived the warranty. Except when the bag got too full, the sturdy machine maintained good suction till the day I carried it out of our house and heaved it into someone else’s trunk.

It wasn’t broken, but every time I used the thing, the canister part rolled under foot so that I repeatedly tripped over it. Whenever I wanted the canister to roll, it rebelled. Either it went the wrong direction or refused to budge at all. Thus, I found myself constantly leaning over and lifting the weighty thing.

I also constantly crossed the room to plug the machine back in. As I vacuumed, the automatic cord would pull taut and jerk itself out of the wall. After vacuuming, when I pressed the button to automatically rewind the cord, it proved perpetually finicky.

We lived in a two-story house, so house cleaning involved carting that heavy, bulky, awkward canister with attached hose and vacuum head up and down the stairs. Each time I did so, I thanked God I made it without falling.

Though difficult, navigating the stairs could at least be done quickly: grit teeth, heave vacuum and go. Not so, vacuuming the carpeted steps. That required taking off the regular vacuum head, replacing it with a tool located in a not-so-accessible slot, followed by much maneuvering and balancing, not to mention running up and/or down the stairs to plug the cord back in.

I would have noticed these drawbacks a lot earlier, but while our young, spry daughters lived at home, vacuuming fell under their list of chores.

Ah, but one after the other, the girls grew up and moved out. Refusing to quit, the vacuum stayed. The more the vacuuming duties fell to me, the more I longed to serve our canister vac an eviction notice.

But alas, the thing wasn’t broken.

You know the old adage: “If it’s not broke, don’t fix it.” Mentally, I added, “Don’t replace it, either.” Because a good vacuum isn’t inexpensive, because we’d paid quite a bit for the one I now wished to toss, because a new one might have similar drawbacks and might not work as well or as long and because other expenditures seemed more urgent or more fun, I kept using that vacuum – and dreading vacuuming and inviting frustration and injury.

In this dispose-it-and-go society, we’re often way too quick to dump what we don’t like for something new. At the same time, we may cling far too long to something that still “works” but not well, that served its purpose in its time but now creates more problems than it fixes.
Jesus said nothing about old vacuums, but he did speak of old wineskins. People asked him (my paraphrase), “Why do your followers do things differently from the followers of John, who preceded you and pointed toward you?”

As usual, Jesus’ answer didn’t seem to match the question. He said, in part, “No one puts new wine into old wineskins. The wine would burst the wineskins, spilling the wine and ruining the skins. New wine needs new wineskins.”

He also admitted, “But no one who drinks the old wine seems to want the fresh and the new. 'The old is better,' they say.”

Seasons change. Those of us with middle-aged bones don’t need to hang on to last season’s heavy, bulky, awkward vacuum. Today, I joyfully report: The old is gone; the new has come! Making the switch meant laying aside misplaced loyalty, fear of change and reluctance to pay the cost.

© 2008, Deborah P. Brunt. All rights reserved.

Sheer red

2008-03-18T13:58:00.001-05:00

We put our house on the market in October, just as headlines announced a national real estate slump.

A year earlier, the houses in our neighborhood were selling quickly, with prices continuing to edge upwards. Suddenly, that had changed.

The realtors with whom we talked tried to sound positive. We noticed how hard they tried. Attractive, well-kept, strategically located, the house did have “dated” wallpaper in bathrooms and dining room. We hired someone to texture those walls and paint them a neutral color.

One morning, I sat, mid-house, in my favorite overstuffed chair, looking at the half-textured dining room walls and asking God why we faced another move that seemed so ill-timed, real estate-wise. Ten years earlier, just before we moved from Indiana, three major companies there closed their local plants. Our Indiana house stayed on the market 14 months, finally selling for substantially less than we’d paid.

God did not answer my question. He sent me to Exodus 11. There, I found myself mid-story.

Repeatedly, the man Moses had visited Egypt’s Pharaoh, declaring, “The Lord says, ‘Let my people go.’” Repeatedly, Pharaoh refused. Repeatedly, plagues decimated Egypt.

In Exodus 11, Moses stood before Pharaoh for the last time. Foretelling the last worst plague, Moses announced, “All these officials of yours will come to me, bowing down before me and saying, ‘Go, you and all the people who follow you!’ After that I will leave.”

In essence, Moses said, “We’re going – on God’s timing and God’s terms.”

That morning, I began announcing the same thing. When our realtor’s reports became increasingly bleak, when our friends asked, “Any bites yet on your house?” I answered, “We’re going – on God’s timing and God’s terms.”

To attract buyers, we lowered the asking price and included significant incentives. After two-and-a-half months, we had no offer. Our realtor said, “All 31 of the comparable homes that I researched when you listed your house are still on the market.”

At 90 days, my husband’s company would make us a buy-out offer. It looked more and more like any offer – whether from a family or the company – would come in way below the already low asking price.

Meanwhile, eyeing the freshly painted dining room, I realized the valance that had hung over the large twin front windows would no longer work there, even temporarily. Our older daughter helped me locate some beautiful sheer, deep-red panels. We hung three panels on a golden rod, one panel draping the outer edge of each window and one hanging between them.

The next morning, sitting in the overstuffed chair, I remembered Exodus 12. In order to leave Egypt on God’s timing and terms, the people had to do a seemingly senseless thing: apply lamb’s blood to the sides and tops of their front doors.

I stared at the three blood-red strips draping our large front windows. Senseless? No. Stunningly symbolic.

House-hunting in the community where we were moving, we discovered a buyer’s market there, too. We bought a house, set a moving date. In Oklahoma City, the 90 days passed without a buyout offer. Due to a discrepancy between the appraisals, the buyout process ground indefinitely to a halt.

The packers packed. The movers loaded. The evening the moving van drove off with all our belongings, I stayed at the house to clean. My cell phone rang. “Deborah, good news!” my husband said. In short, the company’s offer matched what we would have gotten if someone had bought the house for the asking price.

And so we left – on God’s timing, God’s terms.

© 2008, Deborah P. Brunt. All rights reserved.

Tornado watch

2008-03-13T09:48:00.001-05:00

What do you do when you just moved away from tornado alley – and tornadoes are touching down all around you?

You don’t do what you might think.

I hung pictures.

That is, I was deciding where to hang pictures when my husband called from work. “Did you know there’s a tornado warning in this county?” he asked. I turned on the TV. Actually, I turned on two TV’s, tuning them to different local channels. On both, Memphis weathermen told a sobering story. Colliding fronts were producing violent weather in Arkansas, Tennessee and Mississippi. Several tornadoes had formed in our area, including one just southwest of Olive Branch, heading our direction.

While Jerry and his fellow workers gathered in an inner room on the lowest floor of their building, I listened closely to the TV reports – and chased cats.

Tessa, terrified of storms, kept hiding in places I couldn’t find her. Pewter, delighted with the game, kept running away from me and meowing to go outside. By the time I corralled both of them in an inner closet, the tornado threatening Olive Branch had vanished. The huge system spawning thunderstorms, hail and tornadoes had not.

At my request, my husband stopped on his way home to buy a hammer. Everyone else was buying flashlights. Shortly after he reached home, our older daughter called from Oklahoma with a financial question. Answering his cell phone, my husband said, “The reception’s terrible. We’re having storms and tornadoes here. Let me step outside and see if the reception is better.”

He stood outside, talking. I kept watching the nonstop weather coverage, thanked God we still had electricity and fixed supper.

Meanwhile, killer tornadoes hit all around us. The one that had formed to our south and then vanished apparently reformed just north of us, hitting a Memphis mall. Another touched down just to our west, near where I’d planned to run an errand before learning of the stormy conditions.

While both TV’s blared, I hung pictures. Would walls and pictures remain the next morning? Reporters showed one wrecked home, saying the occupants had just moved in the weekend before.

As the first wave of bad weather passed, we braced for a second. Somehow, Pewter convinced my husband to let her out. With wind howling, tall trees behind our house dancing and rain pouring, she lay on a box on our covered back porch, enjoying the spectacle.

What does it mean when tornadoes touch down all around you and the place you are, though equally vulnerable, remains an island of peace in the storm?

Very little that we experience means what it seems at first glance.

Once a God-spokesman named Elijah told his assistant, “On your feet now! Look toward the sea.”

According to 1 Kings 18, The Message, the assistant “went, looked, and reported back, ‘I don't see a thing.’

‘Keep looking,’ said Elijah.”

When the assistant did so, he saw a cloud no bigger than someone’s hand rising from the sea. Quickly, “the sky grew black with wind-driven clouds.” Heavy rain fell. On first glance, that storm meant the end to a long drought. Yet even God’s spokesman, Elijah, did not understand all the storm’s implications.

Because he thought he knew and so quit watching, Elijah misinterpreted what was happening. He misunderstood how to respond.

Whatever wild situations you’re facing, whatever devastation you’re seeing, whatever unexpected oases you’re encountering, don’t assume you understand them. Don’t draw the conclusions that seem obvious at first glance.

Keep looking. Keep listening. In tornado lingo, watch.

© 2008, Deborah P. Brunt. All rights reserved.

Don't stop now

2008-03-06T13:32:00.001-06:00

Sometimes when you want God to speak to you in paragraphs, he talks in monosyllables.

You want reams of explanation, speeches rich with assurance, points and sub-points that describe how-to.

You pray. You wait. You listen.

God promises to answer those who ask, but he doesn’t promise to run like a flunky to do our bidding. We make a mistake when we pray, expecting no answers. We make a mistake when we demand answers.

After all, God is – God. You can upbraid him if you want. He can take it. You can pitch fits and utter ultimatums. You may lean toward those strategies if you’ve found they work well for manipulating people. But God cannot be manipulated, threatened or intimidated.

We go a lot farther toward knowing him, toward hearing him, when we honor him. That includes coming to him on his terms.

God delights in seekers. He makes all kinds of promises to seekers, promises that have to do with finding. In particular, God delights in those who seek – not stuff, not even answers, but him. When we treat him like an afterthought or an underling or Super Santa, we’ll generally find ourselves doing all the talking. When knowing who he is becomes important to us, he will begin to speak.

Some scoff at the idea that God speaks. Once a person asked me, his voice dripping with sarcasm, “So how do you know when God is speaking?” My answer: “How do you know when your mother is speaking?” You’ve learned to recognize her voice.

I can even recognize my cat’s meow. And we’re not dealing with pets here. This God claims to have created heaven and earth, including every person speaking every language. Indeed, this God claims to have created language. That kind of God has no trouble making himself understood.

One day, I drove northwest on a four-lane highway toward golden remnants of sunset. I asked God questions, hoping for lengthy, detailed answers.

He said, “Don’t stop now.” No explanations. No assurances. No details.

At first, that answer irritated me. But then I remembered God’s promise that those who seek find. Taking the monosyllables I’d been given, I began seeking to understand more of what God was saying. As I searched The Message version of the Bible, God spoke in paragraphs.

Psalm 27:14: “Stay with GOD! Take heart. Don't quit. I'll say it again: Stay with GOD.”

Psalm 37:27-28: “Turn your back on evil, work for the good and don't quit. GOD loves this kind of thing, never turns away from his friends.”

Isaiah 26:3-4: “People with their minds set on you [God], you keep completely whole, Steady on their feet, because they keep at it and don't quit. Depend on GOD and keep at it because in the LORD GOD you have a sure thing.”

Matthew 10:21-22: “When people realize it is the living God you are presenting and not some idol that makes them feel good, they are going to turn on you, even people in your own family. There is a great irony here: proclaiming so much love, experiencing so much hate! But don't quit. Don't cave in. It is all well worth it in the end.”

Romans 12:12: “Don't quit in hard times; pray all the harder.”

Sometimes when you want God to speak in paragraphs, he talks in monosyllables. Sometimes he speaks in pictures; sometimes through an inner nudge. The God of infinite creativity has lots to say and many ways to say it.

When you think you’ve heard his voice, begin from there and seek.

© 2008, Deborah P. Brunt. All rights reserved.

Opening boxes

2008-02-28T15:28:00.001-06:00

Opening boxes yields benefits, especially when you open dozens of boxes into which someone else has packed your stuff.

How does such a dreaded task benefit you? Let me count the ways.

1) You find things you haven’t seen in years. You discover items that months of active closet cleaning did not reveal.

Happily, you welcome beloved belongings previously given up as lost. Happily, you toss items you thought you trashed long ago, wishing only that you had not paid to cart them several hundred miles. A bit sadly, you dispose of three unopened packages of 10-year-old wallpaper border that matched the yellow gingham bed linens you just gave away.

2) You find things you didn’t know you had. If your spouse has a mechanical bent, you find tools you didn’t know existed.

3) You see your stuff in a new light. Knowing a stranger has not only eyeballed, but handled, every item you pull from every box, you realize two men who interacted with you for two days know more about your family than you know about yourselves.

You begin to see your stuff through their eyes. You begin to see your life through their eyes. How embarrassing! How enlightening!

4) You get physical exercise. Packing tape doesn’t yield to wimps. Lifting boxes, getting into those boxes, lifting things out of boxes, unwrapping breakables from reams of paper, flattening boxes and carting them to the street, moving items from room to room, then moving them again, and again – you create your own cardio and body-building program. Your abs thank you.

5) You get mental exercise. In fact, your creativity may soar. You may find yourself writing profound song lyrics such as these, sung to the tune of “Somewhere” from the movie, West Side Story:

“There’s a place for you,
Somewhere a place for you,
Place for storing with space to spare.
There’s a place
Somewhere.”

Releasing creativity to its full potential, you admit the place for some things lies in someone else’s home. When you find yourself holding an item and humming, “There’s a time for you, Someday a time for you,” walk quickly to the giveaway box and insert the item before you can reconsider. As in the movie West Side Story, someday usually means “not in this lifetime.”

Soaring creativity also depends on your reminding yourself, “This is a new place and a new season.” Your human default setting will try to recreate the old – to put stuff where it fit or worked or occupied space in the last season. Change that setting.

You now live in a place with differently configured space. You may still want to put the dining room table in the dining room. However, tastefully scrambling your stuff can go a long way toward creating a dramatic home makeover. What’s more, changes can make things more functional. Previously, you put certain items in certain places out of habit, even though the locations did not help you accomplish things the most efficient way.

Now, think before you set. As you open that box, while you unwrap each item, don’t mentally place it in the most familiar setting. Let your mind flow through the house – rooms, closets, drawers – and see if that item fits best in the same place as before or a new place altogether.

Galatians 6, the Message, urges: “Each of you must take responsibility for doing the creative best you can with your own life.” Indeed, whatever dreaded jobs you’re tackling, “Live creatively, friends.”

If that sounds impossible to you, utterly out of reach, hold God’s hand and he’ll take you there.

© 2008, Deborah P. Brunt. All rights reserved.

. . . . . . .

Real lyrics to “Somewhere” can be found at http://www.westsidestory.com/site/level2/lyrics/somewhere.html

Music by Leonard Bernstein, lyrics by Stephen Sondheim.
© 1956, 1957 Amberson Holdings LLC and Stephen Sondheim. Copyright renewed.
Leonard Bernstein Music Publishing Company LLC, Publisher.

Laying foundations

2008-02-21T20:01:00.001-06:00

Gas logs burn in the fireplace. A clock lying on the counter ticks. Tall windows display a hillside arrayed with tall trees.

Our gray cat sleeps in the brown rocker by the window. A yellow neighbor cat sleeps on a stool sitting outside the same window.

Newly placed furniture vies for floor space with stacked boxes and miscellaneous items just unpacked. A lamp base without shade occupies the carpet near an overstuffed chair. A lamp shade without base rests on the coffee table.

Yesterday I organized a kitchen with far fewer cabinets and drawers than our previous kitchen. Even with all the giving away and throwing away we did before the move, along with the handy-dandy organizer units I found and the new donation boxes started, several needed kitchen items still cry for homes.

A houseful of windows cry for coverings.

Much remains to be done – so much that, if I do not consider one room at a time, one task at a time, the job overwhelms me. This assignment requires energy, tenacity, creativity. This assignment has nothing to do with my purpose in this place – and everything to do with it.

Some tasks lay foundations for other tasks. For example, bathing and brushing your teeth have nothing to do with your purpose for any given day, but doing them sets you up for greater success in accomplishing the day’s purposes, especially when those purposes involve relating to other people.

How important to do foundational tasks well! How crucial to making other tasks easier!

The last time we moved, our family of four included two teenagers, a traveling husband and a working mom. We tried valiantly to organize things. Yet, bowing to crowded schedules, we relegated such duties to minutes stolen here and there, often late at night, over a period of months. Exhaustion, confusion and haste do not wise choices make.

Only in the last three years, as God has begun reordering my life, have I realized how greatly the helter-skelter arrangement of our closets, cupboards and drawers handicapped us. Because we didn’t know where to find things, we spent much time hunting, often with great frustration. We bought many duplicates.

Some tasks pave the way for accomplishing other tasks with ease. Because these foundational tasks don’t usually have deadlines, we may let more urgent responsibilities crowd them out. Doing so makes our lives more complicated, more frustrating, less restful and less fruitful.

Proverbs 24:3-4 says, “By wisdom a house is built, and through understanding it is established; through knowledge its rooms are filled with rare and beautiful treasures.”

Right now, I sit, watching the trees stand peacefully outside the windows and the fire flicker within. The gray cat that previously slept in the brown rocker has padded over to lie in my lap. Already, I’m enjoying rare and beautiful treasures.

Knowing my husband and I will build a life here, I ask God for wisdom and understanding to begin it well. In a few minutes, alert to whatever insights God will give, I’ll open another box.

© 2008, Deborah P. Brunt. All rights reserved.

Room revelation

2008-02-14T17:56:00.005-06:00

My room is a mess.

Okay, so the fact might not shock you. A 19-year-old college student, I live out of three locations (the university dorms, my four-door Grand Am and the upstairs bedroom in my parents house). Usually when my bedroom crosses the fine line between controlled chaos and outright catastrophe, my parents teasingly say a tornado seems to have exclusively hit my room.

But if previous messes were tornado-induced, my latest one must have been caused by earthquake, tsunami, and blizzard.

After living on campus last school year, I moved home for the summer while taking classes and working. Six weeks after moving back from the dorms, I still had not unpacked from my dorm room, and the chaos increased by the day. When I finally began clearing my room, it was time to start packing anew – this time for a semester-long overseas trip.

My future plans suggest this could be my last long stint at home, so I’m now undertaking the spring cleanings missed since 2002.

I’ve dusted and vacuumed regularly over the years, but my pack-rat nature has prevented me from disposing of the junk that’s found its way into my living space. Years of clutter have created quite a catastrophe. Now, my hallway, bathroom, closets, and cabinets are caught in the crossfire of a relentless cleaning campaign.

Even after I filled five garbage bags with trash and several others with donations, my room seems messier than ever. I didn’t realize it had the capacity to hold everything I’ve just thrown away, much less the items I use daily! Now that the trash is gone, I still have plenty of work ahead of me.

In the midst of a room renovation, I began to realize something else needed cleaning – my life.

For years I mulled the Bible verse where Paul admonishes Christians to work out their salvation with fear and trembling (Phil 2:12). His statement seemed to contradict another verse in which Paul states that one is saved by grace through faith, not by works (Eph. 2:8-9). Why must we work out our salvation if salvation is not through works?

Why must we continually clean the houses we live in?

Life accumulates clutter. Constant care and effort are needed to maintain a state of order in our hearts. We cannot simply reorganize the junk that clutters our lives. We must trash the garbage or outdated stuff that collects over time.

Everyday happenings – encounters, conversations, emotions, events – fill our lives with memories. Even good experiences can bring in baggage. A regular cleaning of all aspects of our lives – sorting, washing, even disposing – keeps us in order, effective and ready to receive fresh things the Lord has for us to learn.

I’ve made progress in disposing of some baggage that ties me down, but still have a long way to go. As soon as I get everything cleared, something new introduces itself into my life. Each new experience must be evaluated and organized in light of God’s word.

I imagine this process as the constant effort to which Paul refers when he speaks of working out our salvation. A clean life stays that way only if it’s constantly being cleaned.

Despite my latest and greatest efforts, my living space remains a mess. I just pray to God that my life stays clean.

. . . . . . .

Amanda Brunt, youngest daughter of regular Perspective author Deborah Brunt, guest-wrote this column in August 2007, while Deborah was traveling in India and Sri Lanka. Then, Amanda traveled to Cairo, Egypt, for a semester of Arabic and Middle Eastern studies, returning stateside in mid-December. Before she left, Amanda did succeed in cleaning her room.

© 2007, Amanda Brunt. All rights reserved.

Olive Branch

2008-02-07T14:23:00.002-06:00

Where’s a camera when you need one?

I sit cross-legged on tan carpet in an almost-empty upstairs room, facing a large window. Outside, a grove of tall trees with black-and-white bark lift their spindly branches high. The afternoon sun shining through bare treetops throws its light, and the window frames’ shadow, onto the bare wall to my right.

Behind me, against another wall, a solitary blue trunk lies open, most of its contents not yet unpacked.

Before me, a plastic under-bed storage box serves as a low table. On it, sets a wooden bed tray with legs. Today, the bed tray doubles as laptop computer stand. I’m typing on the computer that sits atop the angled tray, while our gray cat Pewter lies in the cubbyhole between wooden tray and plastic box.

Happily, I can type and stroke my cat at the same time.

The scene won’t linger long. Imperceptibly but relentlessly, the sun moves lower. Soon, Pewter will finish her nap and set out to explore more of this strange new place. She’ll jump up immediately if I go downstairs to get the camera.

The room will remain mostly bare a few days longer. Then, boxes and furniture will fill it, daring me to find places for them all.

How fitting that a relocation set in motion in mid-September – the first month of the Jewish calendar – should consummate in January, the first month of the Roman calendar. The weeks between have seemed as suspended as the afternoon sun. Yet the days have moved inexorably forward, ushering my husband and me into a new season in a new place.

How fitting that the place should be named Olive Branch.

In another era entirely, Noah transitioned to a new season in a new place. It took time. On a day God designated, Noah, his family and a zoo-full of animals entered a barge-like ark, leaving forever the life they had known. The ark protected its passengers through 40 days and 40 nights of cataclysmic flood and carried them a total of five months before resting on a mountaintop.

Even then, Noah and party didn’t climb out and go their way. For another 40 days, Noah simply waited. Then, he sent a raven, followed by a dove, on exploratory missions.

The dove proved the more reliable scout. First mission: Unable to land, the dove returned. Third mission: Finding a perch somewhere besides a dark, smelly, filled-to-capacity boat, the dove did not come back.

Ah, but when the dove returned from its second mission, Noah surely wondered, “Where’s a camera when you need one?” Genesis 8:11 says, “When the dove returned to him in the evening, there in its beak was a freshly plucked olive leaf!”

Can’t you hear Noah hollering to his wife, “Get the camera, honey! It’s finally happened! The waters have receded! We won’t have to wait long now!”

Much transition lay ahead for Noah’s clan. A week later, when the dove did not come back, they opened the covering of the ark – then stayed put nearly two more months. The day they stepped out the ark’s door, more than a year after entering it, the family began the daunting process of acclimating to a strange new world.

It’s obvious, though, from the way they passed the story down, that they snapped a picture – even without camera. The rest of their days, when life seemed stuck and hope, suspended, they carried in their hearts the image of that dove, winging toward them at evening, carrying a leaf plucked from an olive branch.

© 2008 Deborah P. Brunt. All rights reserved.

Puzzle pieces

2008-01-24T13:08:00.001-06:00

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.

Present

2008-01-17T12:41:00.001-06:00

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.

Into the storm

2008-01-08T20:16:00.001-06:00

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.

Going in circles

2008-01-02T21:03:00.001-06:00

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.

Do Not Call

2007-12-26T14:57:00.000-06:00

Some days, you learn how much you didn’t know.

At 11:23 a.m., November 28, our home phone rang. Checking the caller ID, I saw “unknown name,” along with a local number: 405-720-1170.

I answered. Immediately, an automated marketing message invited me to sign up for Direct TV. Several years ago, we listed our phone numbers on the National Do Not Call Registry, thus announcing, “Telemarketers, beware: If you call us, you can get in legal trouble.”

Lately, however, we’ve received telemarketing calls, all automated and many having to do with satellite television.

This day, as before, the machine voice told me to press 1 to sign up and to press 2 if I had "received this call in error." Previously, I had pressed 2 and then jumped through numerous hoops to tell the machine not to call our number again. This time I pressed 1 in order to tell the same thing to an actual person.

When the sales rep came on the line, I asked, “What’s your name?”

"Direct TV."

"No, what is YOUR name?" For future reference, I wanted to know who I had told to take us off the list.

He responded, "Do you want to sign up for Direct TV?"

I repeated, "What is your name?"

Sarcastically, he answered, "Mickey Mouse."

"Well, then, Mickey Mouse, would you please remove our number from your calling list." He hung up on me before I could finish the sentence.

Immediately, I dialed the number from which my caller ID said the call had come. A recorded message informed me the number was "disconnected or no longer in service."

So far, I had learned two things: Mickey Mouse works for Direct TV. Caller ID can lie.

Going online to the National Do Not Call Registry website, www.donotcall.gov , I filed a complaint. In answer, I received this reply: “We Are Unable to Accept Your Complaint. The phone number you entered [our landline] is currently not on the National Do Not Call Registry.”

Opening a file drawer, I retrieved my copy of the official “Registration Complete” paper that shows our number listed on the Do Not Call Registry until a date well past November 28, 2007.

“The plot thickens,” I said. Since the Federal Trade Commission maintains the Do Not Call Registry, I called the FTC.

Talk about jumping through hoops. After scanning several web pages to find the customer service number, I dialed 1-877-FTC-HELP, then pressed roughly 37 more buttons – including giving pushbutton answers to “interview” questions – before a living customer service rep picked up the line.

Even she did not know how or why our phone number had apparently dropped off the Registry. Her advice: Register again.

Yet she did inform me: A telemarketing call that begins with an automated prompting is illegal. Regardless whether the number called is listed on the registry, the call is “not legal” and most likely “not legitimate.”

If the FTC rep surmised correctly, the caller did not represent Direct TV but rather is running a scam to get people’s credit card numbers. She told me if even a few people report something like this, FTC lawyers will take action. She filed my report and advised me also to complain to the state attorney general, which I’m now jumping through the hoops to do.

Thus, without knowing it, I uncovered a plot. I reported a scam.

God says in Isaiah 42:16, “I'll take the hand of those who don't know the way, who can't see where they're going” (MSG).

How encouraging! I don't have to know everything - just hold onto the one who does.

© 2007, Deborah P. Brunt. All rights reserved.

Soup

2007-12-12T17:18:00.000-06:00

My family knows the limits of my cooking skills. But they love my hamburger vegetable soup. The simple recipe tastes even better warmed up.

So when I called home on the way out the door after work, Megan said, “Sure, I’ll pull the soup from the ‘frig and put it on to heat.”

Megan knows the limits of her cooking skills, too. After I called, she stuck her head inside the room where our other daughter Amanda and a friend named Courtney practiced a violin piece accompanied by piano. “If you were going to cook soup,” Megan said to Amanda, “what would you put it in?”

When I arrived home, violin and piano still serenaded. The soup bubbled in the correct pan. Our cat, who usually accompanies me into the house, exited immediately. She doesn’t care for company – or for new sounds. (None of us play violin.)

Megan was trying to put together a 70’s outfit to wear to “thrift store day” at school. “What did you wear for shoes back then?” she asked me. Let’s see, before the dawn of time, when we wanted to put something on our feet, we . . .

“If you want to see 70’s styles, go look in your closet,” I told her. “The old styles are the new styles.”

Gathering the trophies from a recent closet search at my parents’ home, along with a couple of items we unearthed around the house, Megan created a fashion package she felt sufficiently out of style – but cute.

The phone rang. Courtney’s mom, Connie, asked to speak to her daughter. At that moment, a vacuum cleaner passing near Connie’s cell phone broke the connection. When Connie called back, Megan asked, “Would you and Courtney like to eat dinner with us?”

“Don’t call it dinner,” I said over my shoulder. “It’s soup.”

With my husband away for the evening, we had five females around the table, all needing to unwind. We dined on soup, crackers and raspberry applesauce. We talked about crazy subjects and serious ones. Megan showed off her thrift store outfit. We all showed off our funniest faces. With far too many tasks still calling to be done, we sat before dirty dishes and laughed.

A year ago, Connie and Courtney walked into our lives, thanks to the violin and piano thing. At that time, Megan accompanied Courtney. Since then, Connie’s become the kind of friend you can invite over for soup. Quite honestly, God has had center stage in the relationship.

A year ago, Connie was seeking God. Maybe I should say, he was seeking her. Connie felt drawn to him, but she had questions. I knew where to go for answers. Connie had hesitations, reservations. I had time.

Don’t get me wrong: Connie and I don’t always talk about God. Over soup, we talked about the 70’s, green beans, and family, among other things. But if either of us wants to talk about God, we always know we can.

In Matthew 7:13-14, Jesus says,”Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.”

On a less traveled road, what a joy to share soup with a fellow traveler – second only to the unspeakable joy of being there when she entered through the gate.

© 2001, 2007 Deborah P. Brunt. All rights reserved.

Shoulder watching

2007-11-29T10:21:00.000-06:00

My shoulders betray me.

Those days when I think I have life’s stresses under control – but do not – my shoulders sound a silent alarm: they tighten, knot and ache. Alternate ice and heat help relax them, as does one of my favorite treats, a 25-minute Swedish massage. But I’ve set my face to seek the kind of inner rest that leaves my body relaxed, even when stresses heighten.

Accomplishing this impossible task requires research. It requires looking at people’s shoulders.

Since this pastime could easily get me in trouble, I’ve begun by checking out shoulders of people long dead, seeing what loads they carried and what happened as a result.

Rebekah, for example, carried a water jar on her shoulder. That worked well, literally. As Rebekah faithfully fulfilled her assignment to draw water from the village well, she met a man who introduced her to her future husband.

Samson carried a city gate. While applauding his strength, we must question his sense. A people called the Philistines counted Samson their number one enemy. So what did Samson do? He walked into a Philistine city and spent the night with a prostitute.

When word got out as to Samson’s whereabouts, the Philistines lay in wait for him, planning to kill him at dawn. Judges 16:3 says, “But Samson lay there only until the middle of the night. Then he got up and took hold of the doors of the city gate, together with the two posts, and tore them loose, bar and all. He lifted them to his shoulders and carried them to the top of the hill that faces Hebron.”

Did arrogance, desire or both take Samson into that city – the last place he should have gone? That time, his brawny shoulders saved him. Further emboldened, Samson continued to repeat the pattern until the day it brought his ruin. Ultimately, Samson died when a building full of Philistines came down around his shoulders.

In Israel, the Kohathite family of the Levite tribe carried holy furniture. In Numbers 7, God gave explicit orders: The primary items of worship in the Israelites’ portable tabernacle could not be transported by cart. The Kohathites “were to carry on their shoulders the holy things, for which they were responsible.”

Centuries later, a king named David discovered God still held the Levites responsible to shoulder the holy things. David tried to transport the primary holy item, the ark, by ox cart – and a man died as a result.

Another Israelite tribe shouldered a load they should never have accepted. Issachar’s dad Jacob saw it coming. In Genesis 49:15, Jacob said of Issachar, “When he sees how good is his resting place and how pleasant is his land, he will bend his shoulder to the burden and submit to forced labor.” Too comfortable, too compliant, Issachar sagged under oppression rather than buck the status quo.

So, okay, I don’t want to remove every load from my shoulders. It’s good – in fact, life-giving – for me to carry those things God has assigned me, regardless whether they look like holy items or water jars.

But how easy to fall into the Samson trap: to repeatedly follow desires that ensnare me and to think that, because I’ve managed to shoulder my way out before, I’ll continue to have strength to do so.

How easy to fall into the Issachar trap: to live for years shouldering oppressive burdens, because doing so requires less effort than casting them off.

Ah, yes, my shoulders betray me. They reveal when I’m carrying something beyond what I was designed to carry, something I need to unload.

© 2007, Deborah P. Brunt. All rights reserved.

Growing trees

2007-11-20T23:10:00.000-06:00

When we moved to Oklahoma, we told our realtor we wanted a newer house on a lot with trees – not baby trees, mind you; mature trees.

We had lived four years in Indiana. There, our house stood on a treeless site wrested from cornfields. Now, we wanted a house young in age with trees tall in stature.

Our realtor looked at us as an adult might look at a child who’s just said something very innocent and very dumb. She first informed us, then demonstrated: The trees in Oklahoma City suburbs generally happen after the fact. You build a house on a lovely, but bare, lot. As part of the landscaping, you add baby trees. Thus, if you want tall trees, you buy an older house.

We looked at older houses but couldn’t find one that passed muster. Several came close – so close, in fact, that our realtor threw up her hands over the one “deal breaker” on which my husband would not compromise. With two middle school age daughters, he wisely insisted on two sinks, not only in the master bath, but also in the girls’ bath. After looking for weeks, we could not find a house more than eight years old that had two sinks in the second bath.

Thus, we bought a seven-year-old house with medium-size trees – you might say, middle school age trees.

Nine years later, my, how those trees have grown! Having left behind that awkward stage, they’ve matured dramatically. They’ve blossomed beautifully.

Sadly, not every tree made it. One standing at the back corner of our lot suddenly succumbed to heat stroke shortly after we moved in.

Two pin oaks, also in the back yard, stood not as tall as me when we bought the house. One of them withered quickly. Five years later, the other had not grown an inch. A few leaves hung from a few branches jutting out from a spindly trunk. That little tree looked like the pin oak version of Charlie Brown’s Christmas tree.

Ultimately, like Charlie Brown, we cut the thing down. Unlike Charlie Brown, we did not decorate it.

I felt the most grief when we said good-bye to the Bradford pear growing next to my home office window. About three years ago, the previously healthy tree began looking piqued. Two tree doctors told us, “It has blight. Cut it down. If you don’t, eventually a strong storm may topple it into your house.”

We waited two years, hoping that tree would defy the experts’ predictions and recover. Finally, confronting our denial, we told the yard man, “Take it down.” He did. I watched. Silly as it sounds, I miss that Bradford pear.

I thoroughly enjoy our several remaining trees, especially the ones visible through our large front and back windows. Yes, they provide shade. But they also provide something intangible, soothing and indescribably pleasant.

In Ezekiel 17:24, God talks about trees. He says, “All the trees of the field will know that I the LORD bring down the tall tree and make the low tree grow tall. I dry up the green tree and make the dry tree flourish. 'I the LORD have spoken, and I will do it'” (NIV).

God grows trees.

Ah, but here’s what both grieves and soothes: What he said there in Ezekiel about trees also applies to people.

© 2007 Deborah P. Brunt. All rights reserved.

This little light of mine

2007-11-15T14:20:00.000-06:00

We moved into our current home in July 1998, amid considerable pandemonium.

Between the general confusion of relocation, my husband’s job, my job and the challenge of getting our two middle-school daughters ready to start fall semester in a new school and a new city, the weeks swept past in a giant blur. I can vaguely recall standing on the cabinet in the family room, cleaning built-in wooden bookshelves that reached to the ceiling. I can recall sitting in the master bath floor, sorting toiletries we’d accumulated for no apparent reason. But I remember little else about those weeks.

Eventually, as we began to settle in, I noticed the lights over our two-sink master bath counter. A row of 12 clear-glass bulbs jutted out from 12 side-facing sockets, each socket hidden inside a shiny-brass cylindrical base, all mounted on a long shiny-brass faceplate. Nine of the bulbs looked like clear-glass globes. Three bulbs, jutting from three miscellaneous sockets, looked like glass candle flames – hanging sideways, of course. I call them chandelier bulbs.

All 12 bulbs had the same size base. All emitted light when we flipped the appropriate switch, but alas, three bulbs didn’t match.

This bothered me a bit. It would have bothered me more if I’d had time to breathe. But since all of us had way more to do than we could possibly get done, I didn’t even consider trying to replace the three chandelier bulbs with three round globe ones.

Instead, whenever I noticed the row of lights shining against a golden background and momentarily wished the three renegades matched the rest, I reminded myself, “As soon as they blow out, I’ll replace them with the round globe kind.”

Weeks turned into months; months, into years. Over time, I replaced many light bulbs, including a number of round globes hanging in the master bath.

In July 2006, eight years after we moved into the house, all three chandelier bulbs still brightened our bathroom. By then, I’d committed for the duration. Just how long would these seemingly eternal flames last?

Let me hasten to say: These bulbs did not owe their longevity to lack of use. We turn on this panel of lights as often as any lights in the house. Whenever we walk into the master bath, we flip the switch that ignites those 12 bulbs. Whenever that room has occupants – and many times when it does not – those bulbs are shining.

I didn’t record exact dates, but sometime before we reached the nine-year mark, one chandelier bulb quit, then another. I laid each to rest gently, almost sadly. July 2007, the last little chandelier bulb, holding the farthest socket from the bathroom door, celebrated another anniversary, still going strong.

Three months later, we decided the wallpaper that had graced the bathroom walls for 16 years had seen its day. On October 17, the man hired to texture and paint those walls unscrewed the 12 bulbs hanging over the master bath counter, in order to more easily reach the wall above.

Immediately, he came to me with the chandelier bulb in hand. “This bulb is loose,” he said. Wobbling dangerously in its base, the bulb could not be used again.

In Revelation 2:2-5, Jesus sent a personal letter to a group of his people. The Message paraphrases Jesus’ words this way: “I see what you've done, your hard, hard work, your refusal to quit,” it began. “I know your persistence, your courage in my cause, that you never wear out.”

Interesting, huh? Persistent. Refusing to quit. “You never wear out.”

The letter continues, “But you walked away from your first love — why? What's going on with you, anyway? Do you have any idea how far you've fallen?”

Then, this passionate outcry: “A Lucifer fall! Turn back! Recover your dear early love. No time to waste, for I'm well on my way to removing your light from the golden circle.”

Oh. Pondering Jesus’ cry, I see a picture God took nine years and three months to paint. I see a little chandelier bulb that never blew out – but had to be removed because it separated from its base.

© 2007 Deborah P. Brunt. All rights reserved.

Timed-release blessings

2007-11-09T17:45:00.000-06:00

The e-mail mystified me. I didn’t recognize the writer’s name. Her message began, “I’m sorry I didn’t get a chance to speak with you at [my] church today. I was at the bookstore table and couldn’t get away to thank you for what the Lord taught this church through you.”

The church she named stands several states away from where I live. I had indeed spoken there. My topic? Confessions of a Religious Has-Been. This talk does not leave listeners feeling pleasantly warm and fuzzy. It challenges them to step into a freedom they haven’t known. To do so, church-goers in particular must confront the web of religious thinking entangling them.

As the topic suggests, I speak from experience. I dangled in a religious web. I pledged allegiance to things connected with God that are not God. Wanting to look like Jesus Christ, I conformed to the pattern of the Pharisees. Tragically, I invited others into similar entanglements.

Through a series of traumatic circumstances, I saw the prison that held me. I heard Christ’s call, “Come out!” “Be free!” (Isa. 49:9 NIV). Responding meant inviting an identity crisis. It meant leaving behind a deeply frustrated – but comfortably familiar – me. The moment I took the keys God was holding out, “He brought me out into a spacious place; he rescued me because he delighted in me” (Psalm 18:19 NIV).

He did not bring me out from the church, which he has always defined, not in terms of buildings or programs, but in terms of the people he knows as his. He did not lead me out of Christianity. Oh no. Freeing me from what hindered, he catapulted me to a new place of intimacy with him and genuine community with others who love him.

So now, Martin Luther and I have something in common. October 31, 1517, Luther reportedly posted Ninety-five Theses on the doors of the Castle Church in Wittenberg, Germany. He titled his document, The Ninety-Five Theses on the Power of Indulgences. He could have called it, Confessions of a Religious Has-Been. Luther challenged the churched people of his day to see the web of religious thinking entangling them and to step into a freedom they hadn’t known.

I was born October 31. Now when I make my own confessions, some churched people act skeptical; some, shocked. Invited to romp in this spacious place, some take offense. Some panic. When prisons we do not see trap and define us, freedom repels and terrifies us.

What a blessing to receive an e-mail from someone who has embraced the freedom Christ offers and who wrote to assure me (my paraphrase), “Yes, yes, yes! You said exactly what we needed to hear!”

How mystifying, the little word “today.”

The Sent date on the message matched the date I sat reading the e-mail, yet I had spoken at that church seven months before. The woman’s description of my talk reflected what I’d said months earlier. Yet, she wrote, “I’m sorry I didn’t get to speak with you . . . today.”

In reply, I thanked her for writing, then expressed my confusion. She responded, “Did you just get this e-mail today???? I did, indeed, send this e-mail the very day you came to my church seven months ago.”

Some 490 years after Luther’s bold act, we marvel at the multiplied blessings God has released as a result. Some seven months after I poured out my soul in one gathering of frustrated but comfortable church-goers, I marveled at the unexpected blessing and strong encouragement God released to me.

© 2007 Deborah P. Brunt. All rights reserved.

Parable of the Bradford Pear

2007-10-31T20:23:00.000-05:00

God has a knack for juxtaposing things that seem to have no connection – and connecting them.

We’re most open to catch what he’s saying in moments when our minds relinquish the role of teacher and sit as lowly learners. This doesn’t happen as often as we might think.

Our minds like to take charge. In “learning” settings, they filter what we’re hearing, dictating what to receive and how to interpret it. Even when God is talking, our minds block and rearrange, dismember and puree what he is saying before actually considering it.

Thus usurping the teacher’s role, we remain unteachable and untaught. Thinking we’re learning, we pummel and crush what would have given fresh understanding until it fits into our pre-approved compartment of choice.

Recognizing this, God delights to teach us in times and ways we least expect it, times when our conscious minds don’t see truth coming and so don’t get in the way.

Last October, I was walking neighborhood streets, taking a path I’ve trodden so often and so long that I’ve almost worn ruts in the blacktop. This path takes me past a school where I’ve discovered a surprising oasis of sorts – a small secluded area with shade trees and benches.

That afternoon, nearing the end of my walk, I had a brief, one-sided conversation with God. He did the talking. “Go sit,” he said.

Turning aside from my path, I headed for one of the concrete benches and sat.

“Look up,” he said.

Above me, a Bradford pear spread its branches. Tilting my head backward, I gazed up at a delightfully variegated tree. Random sections of leaves had turned a deep red. Other sections remained green. It looked as if someone had taken a giant paint brush, dabbed it in red paint and, circling the tree, had repeatedly flicked the brush toward the tree, splashing red everywhere.

Ah, but those leaves weren’t dabbed with an exterior latex. Once intrinsically green, they had changed from within. Now intrinsically red, they could not turn back. Soon, the still-green leaves would change too.

Just a few days before Jesus’ crucifixion, he was leaving the Temple in Jerusalem when someone remarked, “What a beautiful building! How impressive the architecture!”

According to Luke 21, Jesus responded, “The time will come when not one stone will be left on another; every one of them will be thrown down.” He added, “When you see Jerusalem being surrounded by armies, you will know that its desolation is near.”

Not good news, I’d say. But to the minds of those listening, Jesus’ statements sounded more ludicrous than frightening. How could such a fine structure, such a permanent structure, be so thoroughly demolished?

When a few learners asked Jesus to elaborate, he talked about seasons and trees. “Look at the fig tree and all the trees. When they sprout leaves, you can see for yourselves and know that summer is near. Even so, when you see these things happening, you know that the kingdom of God is near. I tell you the truth, this generation will certainly not pass away until all these things have happened.”

Less than 40 years later, in A.D. 70, the Roman army besieged and conquered the city of Jerusalem. Both city and Temple were completely destroyed.

In another place, another century, I sat on a concrete bench, head tilted back, eyes open to a new season in progress. Staring upward at the leaves of a changing Bradford pear, I saw the people of God.

© 2007 Deborah P. Brunt. All rights reserved.