Memorial Day

Memorial Day, 2007, Decoration Day to the over-70 crowd, has passed. The grills have cooled, the flags have been brought in, buglers have put their horns away, Indy cars are back in their garages, and the lump in the throat has shrunk.

So why am I sad? Another Monday is over and my routine is back to normal. A new month is at hand. I have money in my pocket and the motel reservations for a summertime trip are confirmed. Birds are singing and my dog sleeps at my feet while I win another game of Free Cell.

For no reason clear to me, I hang on to two troubling blips on the screen of my memory. Those blips are like the dark spots that are always moving before my eyes but never disappear from my vision. Whether I focus on them or try to ignore them, they persist.

One of the little dark spots on my Memorial Day experience first appeared during the Sunday morning worship hour. The sermon was helpful, the choir sang beautifully, the towering gothic arches and beautiful stained glass windows hinted at a paradise not yet known. There was nothing in anything I heard, saw, touched, or smelled that marred the worship of God. But it was an absence, a lack of something that spilled a drop of black ink on my mental Renoir scene.

As one of the ministers prayed for and with the congregation, she thanked God for ministers, apostles, and rulers of the church and placed the sick, homeless, poor, and troubled in the healing, comforting presence of Jesus. But not a word about my gratitude for veterans, no mention of uniformed men and women living under constant threats of death, no petition for the relief of anxiety and anguish endured by parents and spouses of soldiers, marines, sailors, and airmen. No mention of the “ …heroes proved in liberating strife, who more than self their country loved, and mercy more than life!”

How could the public worship of God be authentic or relevant without gratitude and intercession encouraged by a sacred, national holiday?

The second dark spot on the holiday appeared on Monday’s front page of my hometown daily newspaper. In a caption under the picture of a US Marine sergeant, I read “Marine Sgt. Robert Ballance was given the Bronze Star Medal during the last of his three tours in Iraq.”

“Given?” Like a birthday gift? Because he was lucky?

Sgt. Ballance wasn’t given the Bronze Star, he earned it! He earned it by exposing himself to enemy fire on multiple occasions . . . he personally directed the fires of the squad by moving from position to position . . . His quick thinking and decisiveness in the face of heavy enemy fire assisted the patrol in overwhelming the enemy force and ensured all casualties were treated and safely evacuated.

If there were any “giving” that day, Sgt. Ballance was the giver. He gave courage and encouragement; strength and determination; loyalty and competence.

Sergeant Ballance accepted a Bronze Star Medal from a grateful country and his fellow Marines. They recognized the gift they had been given.

And so should we.

Those men and women who gave their lives or portions of them have earned the respect and admiration of every American who has enjoyed freedom from the horrors of war. Even ministers and journalists.

Old dogs; old truths

One of the men who greatly influenced my life, Elton Trueblood, said on his 70th birthday, "Education is too wonderful and valuable to limit it to the young." I was not quite 33.

Decades later I still remember his words. Maybe not the exact words, but certainly the idea. The idea that advancement in years ought not to bring an end to learning is more and more at the core of things I really believe.

Not to believe this truth is, frankly, impossible. In my case, even though I may be too old to negotiate schoolhouse stairs and too old to run the halls with youngsters, learning is routinely forced on me. My learning is as persistent as my sinning. An old woman who willingly confessed being guilty of the sin of gossiping, said, "I know I don't have to sin; but I just can't help it." That was more than forty years ago and I still remember her words.

Friends, you don't have to keep learning in your approach to the golden years; you just can't help it.

Come along with me as I follow the road to truths newly recognized.

When I wrote a newspaper column, I knew the limits of my audience. No one in Illinois read my musings that appeared in Jackson, Michigan's newspaper. No one I knew in Michigan subscribed to the Nashville (Illinois) News. This limited circle of readers tempted me with subject possibilities. Since my in-laws in Illinois never read Jackson Michigan's Citizen-Patriot, I could tell Michigan readers about the silly ways of my in-laws without fear of retribution from anyone but my wife. In a similar way, I could tell newspaper readers in Illinois about some of the foibles of parishioners in Michigan without eating those words. Laughing at the antics of people one will never meet is not only permissible, but can be good for one's mental health. Shaking one's head in disgust at wrongs in a distant community can scratch the itch of self-righteousness without exposing one's own hubris.

Blogging, on the other hand, doesn't tolerate limited readership. Folks in Michigan can read the same stuff and at the same time as folks in Illinois or Freeport, Maine for that matter. I am learning how to be more discreet and more timid, two traits that have been neglected in my life.

Although the lesson has not yet been forcefully made, I have learned there might be unintended and uncomfortable consequences if I ignore the need for discretion and tact as I "blog.".

More importantly, I am learning whom I have been.

As I search for a topic to write about that will be received kindly by every potential reader, whatever their location, relationship, political philosophy, prejudices, and level of tolerance for the irrelevant and irreverent, the list of topics is quite small.

I am learning that the best escape from this nagging lack of subject matter is to adopt a policy of authenticity. To the degree that I write with integrity and in a voice that is authentic, responses and reactions to my words and ideas shrink in importance. Shakespeare, using the mouth of a less than admirable character in Hamlet, recognizes some level of wisdom in the advice "… to thine own self be true."

That idea brought me another learning experience.

For most of my life, I have not been very proficient in originality. Every good idea, every Church doctrine, every article of faith, every position on every issue, and even every imagination I have espoused or called my own have not actually been mine. Rather, those beliefs, doctrines, understandings, teaching points, and opinions have been someone else's. I have been a master at taking another person's position, chewing it as a cow does her cud, and then passing it along as my own. I have discovered that knowing one has never been original is not original.

Although I am not ashamed of being the echo of another's wisdom and originality, I think I should at least make a diligent effort to be creative, original, and authentic. I suspect that those traits are especially respected in heaven.

How do you learn whom you have been? Or want to be?

What I Have Been Reading

I have been on a reading binge the last couple of weeks. I think it may have started when I received The Last Town on Earth as a birthday gift from my son. That novel is a gripping, suspenseful tale set in a small timber mill town in the Pacific Northwest during the great influenza epidemic of the last century. The residents of the town, in an effort to save themselves from the rampant and deadly epidemic, decided to allow no outsider to enter their town until the epidemic had spent itself.

As I read the novel, I watched people try to save themselves by sacrificing contact with other communities while fighting against the push of individual desires and the pull of the common good. The conflicts between good and evil, courage and fear, reason and emotion, and opposing loyalties had me sighing and saying to myself, “Yes, that’s the way it is.” Like good fiction generally does, this book held a mirror before me and asked me how far would I go to protect me and mine. A great read! I recommend it.

The life all around me by Ellen Foster, is a another book by popular author, Kaye Gibbons. I had read an earlier Ellen Foster book so thought a sequel might be as entertaining as the first. Wrong! I finally quit reading at the half-way mark. The writing style is too confusing and requires more concentration than I can muster.

Next, my daughter gave me Larry Crabb’s Shattered Dreams to read. The title was real and alive to me because I have been with a lot of people when their dreams had been shattered. Thinking I knew something about shattered dreams ‑ not so much my own, but of others ‑ what new perspective might I gain from this book?

Like the author, I have watched and waited for God to make an appearance in human suffering, especially the kind of suffering that comes with shattered dreams.

A bright young man had a promise-filled future until he slipped into the chasm of mental illness. A high school graduate, headed for college collided with a drunk driver and immediately became a human vegetable. The seven-year-itch redefined “family” for two small children. Hearing the doctor say, “It’s cancer.” Getting a pink-slip at age 50. Infertility. Bankruptcy. Each of these circumstances authored a story of shattered dreams.

“Why didn’t God do something in those situations to rescue the sufferers? He could have done something, but he didn’t.” These two questions asked by the author hooked me and pulled me deeper into his book. Thinking I might find a new version of the old bromide, “Some things are not meant to be understood,” I was pleasantly – no, profoundly – surprised by what I read.

Closing the book after reading the last chapter, I realized that I had just read a book that earned a spot on my List of Books That Influenced My Thinking and Life. As an old Quaker once said, “It spoke to my condition.” So it did.

Right now I am reading a biography, The Most Famous Man in America. A man of the Civil War Era, but not a political or military figure. Of all things, a preacher – Henry Ward Beecher. Brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and son of the Rev. Lyman Beecher, a key figure in the Second Great Awakening that was marked by revival meetings that sought renewal of salvation experiences and gave birth to the social movements of abolition, temperance, and women’s rights.

Henry was a prankster as a child, not very good in school, and eventually a rebel against his father’s hyper-Calvinism. A model worthy of imitation? I haven’t finished the book yet, but maybe.

More likely, a help to me as I write some stories about a fictional Rev. McMasters.

A sanctuary for immigrants

The Associated Press put the provocative headline, Churches to provide immigrants sanctuary, on my computer screen 24 minutes ago. I wanted to assume that the news story would tell a story like the Swedish immigrants to Chicago told in an earlier century. That story went something like this.

Immigrants from Sweden after arriving in America wanted to share their blessings with Swedes immigrating after them. Those first Swedish-Americans brought a Church with them and that Swedish Church built or bought apartment buildings to house later arrivals from Sweden. While staying at one of these church-owned apartments, the recently arrived immigrants were helped to learn English, find a job, and enroll their children in school as they began making the necessary adjustments needed for their new lives in the United States.

After a short immersion into the American society and culture, those families would move out of the Church-owned apartments and another Swedish immigrant family would move in. They, the earliest Swedish immigrants, supported the Evangelical Free Church that in turn gave aid, a safe place, and encouragement to new arrivals.

Who could be against the kind of "sanctuary" ministry to immigrants? Not me.

But the AP story was not about churches following the model of immigrant Swedes. Instead, it reports that one congregation of different denominations offers safe haven to one immigrant who broke the nation's laws to get here. The purpose of this new "sanctuary" ministry is not to teach English; not to assist the immigrant in finding employment; not to help transition into a new culture and society; not to explain the laws of the land, but to avoid arrest.

Should a congregation protect a law-breaker? Should a congregation itself break the law?

The Bible says both yes and no to questions about lawbreaking and lawbreakers. Romans, chapter 13, says to obey the governing authorities and Revelation, chapter 13, says a governing authority can be evil and those who obey an evil authority will be at war with God.

A few decades ago, churches and generous Americans "adopted" hundreds and thousands of Southeastern Asian families, made their path to assimilation navigable, and affirmed again that America is a land of opportunity and freedom.

We sometimes have to learn from our mistakes, but couldn't we also learn from our successes?

My Cronies and I Talk

I have lunch every Thursday with a couple of men I affectionately call, “my cronies.” We meet at Olive Garden and order the same thing every week. Salad with lots of cheese; soup, two pasta e fagioli and one minestrone, each with cheese; two diet Cokes and a water with lemon; and a handful of individually wrapped chocolate mints.

We aren’t that rigid in choosing subjects for our conversation although we generally like to imagine what God would say on whatever subject we lay on the table.

We have talked about our children, our grandchildren, and everybody younger than 60. We occasionally talk about politicians but most of the time we steer away from subjects that might raise our blood pressure. Neither do we waste our breath reviewing the lives of Oprah, Imus, or Brittney but leave those discussions to those who have an interest in or care about celebrities. What we do talk about is ourselves. A lot!

You see, we are guys who haven’t got life and our place in it all figured out yet. Life expectancy tables urge us to think more deeply about issues we once skirted and postponed. Some of those ignored issues have now become issues that can be categorized as “end of life issues.” We have compared notes about how we have dealt with our slide into “not as good as it was” physical health. We find it amusing that a few brief words from one of us about a prostate exam, colonoscopy, or his bladder capacity enhances our privacy by eliminating deliberate eavesdropping.

But committed eavesdroppers don’t give up so easily. One day they might hear us confess of dumb things we did long ago when we knew everything. On another day, our discussions might be about relationships we have nurtured or destroyed. Although divorce, indiscretions, and infidelities are deeply personal issues, they are not prohibited in our noontime fellowship. Without fail, reflecting on those unpleasant subjects leads my cronies and me to conclude that we have been blessed by mercy, especially from those who love us most.

Besides physical health and lifestyle issues, our conversation often wanders into spiritual realms. The unspoken motive that begins most of these spiritual discussions is rooted in a search for an honest answer to the question, “Am I making any progress in my walk with Jesus?”

I recently told my cronies about my desire to make a strong finish in my race to heaven. Influenced by an old preacher who prayed, “Lord, don’t let me drown close to shore,” I have used his imagery in more than one circumstance to guide me. I have always understood the old preacher’s desire not to drown in shallow water after a long and tiring swim because he could have stopped swimming and just walked to shore.

My cronies and I talked about the tasks that were finished before we recognized the struggle was over. I sometimes keep working as though more effort is needed even though it’s not. The time is at hand when I should stop swimming because I’m in shallow water and could walk out of the water if I only stopped swimming.

There comes a time when parents have to quit protecting and providing for their children. The parenting job is finished and parents need to stop the life-saving rescue.

There are times when a retiree is merely wasting energy to continue striving to make a better widget, improve working conditions, or earn more money.

Church members are sometimes made weary by the effort to maintain successful, but old programs, instead of letting those who just fell out of the boat do the swimming in new waters.

As I float on my back, headed toward shore, its nice to see and talk with friends who are as wrinkled as I am because we have been in the water too long.

Are you swimming or walking?