Smile -- You're on heaven's camera!

What brings a smile to your face? A tear to your eyes?

For me, it’s the little things in life the unanticipated events, the chance remark, the unbidden dream, and the little things that don’t matter much. Of course, big begets BIG. I cried buckets of tears when my parents died. Smiles dominated my face on our wedding day, when the children were born, and when the Illini beat Michigan and Ohio State in football both in the same year.

But those big things are too rare to depend on to maintain a persistent smiley disposition. Instead, it’s in the little things and the daily routine that we find reasons to smile. This week I’m smiling.

A couple of nights ago, I had a dream. Nothing unusual about that. I take some little pills to adjust the chemistry in my brain and one of the side effects of that medicine is that nighttime dreams come every night with uncommon intensity and a magnified vividness. These dreams are not just a nighttime extension of the day’s events, but often speak of recurring fears, doubts, and failures.

One of my recurring dreams has me scheduled to take a school examination. In the dream I am well prepared and confident, but when I get into the room where the exam will be taken I discover I have prepared for the wrong test. To think one is to take a history exam only to discover the test subject is calculus, is not a pleasant feeling. No smiles coexist with that kind of fear. But at least the dream gives my mind a safe way to experience the fear of failure.

Another recurring dream is about churches. The other night, I dreamt that I was a pastor again of a typical congregation. In the dream, a friend told me that a member of the congregation had included me in her will that she had changed just prior to her death. I knew the woman but not well. We had nothing more enduring than a routine pastor/parishioner acquaintance. Surprised and skeptical about her reasons to include me in her will, I showed up at the time appointed for its reading. I listened while her wealth and treasures were doled out to her relatives and then in the last line of the will, the attorney read, “To my pastor, I bequeath a brand new commode.”

Sure enough, there it was in the lawyer’s office, shiny and complete with its double lid. As I carried my new commode home, I wondered what the woman had been thinking. Putting aside the blasphemous and cynical thoughts, I concluded that she gave me a way to rid myself of all the S--- I had been given. I woke up laughing!

Days later, awake, I returned to that dream again and again and each time, I smiled. I think the dream tried to explain that in every congregation there is an unlikely someone who wants to give a commode to the pastor – to flush away you-know-what that comes with the territory. Oh, if only we all had someone to give us a commode to handle what we put up with. At that thought, I smiled again.

Won’t you smile when a similar commode, a way to flush the stink out of your life, comes your way?

On the first day of a Shakespeare class I am taking at the University of Illinois – Springfield, the professor came dressed in a shirt, tie, trousers, coat, shoes, and no socks. I smiled! After all, Shakespeare isn’t about black wing-tips and over the calf socks. I smiled again.

Yesterday, in the same class, I overheard a young woman, no more twenty years-old, say to her classmates, “In all my years of study of the English language, even Middle English, I have never seen words that Thomas Hardy uses in Tess.”

In all her years – I hope not. I, a near 70-year-old student who assumes she has some years yet to live, smiled at her mismatch of words and meaning. At age seventy, I grin at the concept that I might have learned enough about anything. And I suspect octogenarians smile at this 70 year-old’s premature conclusions.

Go – search for a smile. Begin looking in the life of someone 20 years your junior. Don’t quit looking until you find a smile in an unpleasant memory.

John

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Breakfast time

If you are like me, one who often finds truth complex and confusing, maybe the idea of finding a simple truth improving life taunts you, as it has me. Is something more than taunting possible? When is the last time you had some simple truth make a significant impact on your routine life?

If it has been awhile or if you don’t have an immediate answer, you might be interested how a simple truth has recently impacted my life.

My story really begins at night on a hillside near Pleiku, Vietnam in 1966. The heavens were cloudless and starry, undisturbed by the loud booms of howitzers in the distance. The majesty of the scene high above me demanded that I think about the Creator. So I did. The opening lines of Psalm 8, a psalm I had recently memorized, bridged the expanse between heaven and my feelings. “O LORD, our Lord, how majestic is thy name in all the earth.” Yes sir, the size, power, and greatness of the One who put the heavens together were unmistakably obvious that night.

As I silently recited the remainder of the psalm, I heard an ancient Hebrew ask the same question I was asking. “What is man that thou art mindful of him and the son of man that thou dost care for him?”

I grabbed hold of an important truth that night that I have never forgotten. For the rest of my life I have known how mighty God is and how puny I am. Neither side of that truth, God’s majesty nor my insignificance, has ever been an area of doubt for me.

But the years and logic that followed left me wondering; wondering if I could have a close relationship with God on the far side of a space-wide chasm. Could the creator of the universe, high in the heavens, touch me where I craved to be touched and love me as I wanted to be loved?

As the calendar pages kept flipping past, I worked hard to find convincing evidence that Almighty God chose to love little old me. In seminary, my mind was satisfied that God loved me. As a pastor of souls, I was bombarded with signs that God cared enough about others to use me to bring some hope and consolation to weary pilgrims. Surely God was displaying his confidence in me to give me such noble opportunities to serve.

By now, in the autumn of my life, I have compiled a rather long list of blessings in my account. A supportive wife who has loved me for more than 50 years, children who honor their parents, a faulty life expectancy table, money in the bank, a Buick in the garage, and a comfortable home where I sleep and eat in peace – all are blessings I recognize. I understand them as signs that God chose to love me, a guy who could mess up a two car funeral and who makes Murphy seem like an optimist.

Again and again, I have been persuaded by hard, unimpeachable evidence that a transcendant God chooses to love me. Well … almost persuaded. The mirror where I shave, however, has kept me from being absolutely persuaded. In that mirror, I see a man I often don’t like, the man living under that thin layer of opaque skin. How could a self-centered guy who doesn’t always love himself be loved by a personal God?

Then it happened! At the breakfast table a few days ago, my wife and I were discussing a short passage from the Bible. The Scripture boldly stated that God chose us even before he laid out the universe. God’s choosing of us turned into talk about the ways that God has blessed us. After listening to my wife’s litany of blessings, in the smooth words of a Reverend, I said, “Yes, God must really love us.”

Before I put the period on that sentence, God interrupted my thinking and added a different ending to my thought. “Yeah, but I didn’t have to.”

That thought, God “didn’t have to” wouldn’t go away. All day long and for several days afterwards, I kept hearing those words, “Yeah, but I didn’t have to.” Slowly at first, and then at a faster clip, I threw out the many lies I had accepted through several decades; lies that can be summed up this way. “God can’t help it that he loves me; that’s the kind of God he is.”

That God didn’t have to choose me, love me, or bless me added a refreshing perspective to what I already believed. And my life is different again. Different and better. Thank God!

In the same way, if God didn’t have to choose you, love you, or bless you, but did anyway, you have yet another reason to be glad – a gladness that soaks into your whole life.

John

Lying lips

"Lying lips are an abomination to the Lord . . ." Proverbs 12.22

Know any liars? A dishonest tree trimmer pushed me into a frame of mind that asks about liars.

Think of the people I know who are liars, I appreciate anew the gift of forgetfulness. Not to remember all the times I have heard is one of the less obvious blessings of my life. Today, as I try to think of liars I have known, one stands out in my memory.

Of course I am ignoring several categories of liars. Ones who tell little white lies, those harmless falsehoods like the 60-pound watermelons and 12-pound blue gill fish your brother-in-law boasts about, don't count.

Writers who change the name of characters "to protect the innocent" don't count as liars in my book either. Children caught prevaricating about the absence of cookies in grandma's cookie jar are also exempt. Politicians and prison inmates may be liars, but because their lies surprise no one they can be ignored for the same reasons I do not name the mosquitoes that inhabit my back yard. I even grant a stay-out-of-jail card to those souls who lie so often, they don't know when they are lying.

No, when I speak of liars, I mean those diabolical people who intentionally and deceitfully misrepresent the truth for some benefit to themselves.

I remember the first time I encountered a honest-to-goodness, in the flesh liar. It was during my teen years.

That tells you what kind of sheltered childhood I had. I doubt any teenager today can boast of such naivety or innocence. But that is another essay for another time.

I was 15-years-old and had an assignment to drive my mother, my grandmother, and my great aunt to St. Louis so they could shop in the city. For them, the day was special; shopping in a huge department store without a husband who kept asking, "Do we really need that?" For me too, the day was special because I got to drive more than a hundred miles and amidst city traffic. Even though my passengers were not on my list of people I most wanted to accompany me to the city of crowds and stop lights, driving my parent's 1951 Plymouth was a duty I understood as a treat.

About 35 miles into our northbound trip, a huge tractor trailer truck carrying coal in the southbound lane pulled out to pass a car in his lane. Before he noticed us the truck was about three feet on my side of the center line. Even though I was hugging the right edge of the highway, the mammoth truck clipped our little Plymouth's rear fender.

A State trooper arrived and began taking statements from the truck driver and me for his report. He spoke first to the truck driver. "Tell me what happened."

With a straight face, the truck driver said, "I was driving in my lane when I saw this car coming toward me real fast. Just as that car got even with my truck, I guess the driver lost control and the car swerved across the center line and fish-tailed into my truck."

I couldn't believe what I was hearing. As soon as it was my turn to tell what happened, I asked the trooper a question. "Sir, I am 15-years-old. My mother, my grandma, and my aunt were in the car. Do you really think I would be driving over the speed limit with them in the car when one word from them to my dad would mean I would never get the keys again? I was driving 45 mile-per-hour when the truck started to pass a car in his lane. He crossed the center line and hit our rear fender."

The trooper must have believed me because I never got a ticket or heard anything more about the accident. But I never recovered from the shock of hearing a grown man tell a policeman a bold-faced lie for no purpose other than his benefit. In my short life, I had never heard a man lie.

A few weeks ago, a tree trimmer overcharged me $150. He agreed with my idea of a fair price and said he would return the money to my home a few days later. I waited and he never came, so I called him to learn if I had misunderstood. Again he said he would settle the matter with me by sending a check for $150 in the mail. A few days later, with no sign of the money, I left a message for him at his business suggesting that maybe the postal authorities should be contacted since the money never arrived.

So I have been educated about human nature by many, many people plus two liars. The tuition for the learning the exception was $150.

Did I get a bargain or what?