A Little Grace

When I got home from church tonight my husband told me that we had had a visitor about an hour before. She was a young, dark-haired woman, and my husband said she had a dog in her car. She also seemed to know Scout. She asked for "Pastor Roth," but I was at our church's book group, discussing Pillars of the Earth.

She dropped of a gift card for Borders and a nice bouquet of flowers.

The flowers look really nice on our dining room table, and in the middle of the developing pre-refinishing-hardwood-floor mess.

Right now, I can't figure out who the visitor is. It's a mystery, and I can't figure it out. I thought I would look through the church directory, but I forgot to bring one home.

I've been asking a lot of questions, like "Did she wear glasses?" "Was she tall?" I think my husband is tired of me answering questions. I think I need to just let it be.

It's hard though. I can't figure out what prompted this unexpected gift. I want to figure out the mystery.

It's made me think back, though, on gifts I have received, recently and long ago, some large, mostly small.

Three quilts, from the ladies' aids at each of my churches in South Dakota
a quart of fresh raspberries delivered to my door every July.
Deer Sausage, green beans, wild asparagus
a handmade angel
a small Japanese teacup from the town of Hagi
the recipe for Tortellini Soup
three small hand made books given to me by strangers

It's an abundant life, really, if I allow myself to catch a glimpse of it
if I allow myself to open my hands and share it.

In Honor of our Tenth Anniversary this Weekend...

.... we are starting a project we have never before attempted (though we have often talked about it).

We are getting ready to have our hardwood floors refinished.

There, I said it. It is just one simple sentence, ten words. And yet, this project seems much more daunting than anything we have attempted yet. We re-finished the basement. We painted the living room, kitchen and bathroom. We constructed a shed in the back yard (I think that the boys were actually more involved with that than I was).

Ten simple words, one sentence, but here is what our project involves: pulling up 1970s style green carpet from living room and hallway. Cleaning and re-organizing porch and basement. Sweeping, tossing, and organizing in our garage. Taking almost all of our furniture out of the upstairs and finding temporary new homes in other parts of the house, porch or garage. (This involves both brainwork and brawnwork.)

Tonight I spent about an hour in the garage, just getting started: getting rid of a bag's worth of leaves, styrofoam peanuts and other miscellaneous items from the floor.

What is it Confucius said? The journey of 1,000 miles begins with a single step?

What did he know, anyway?

This weekend we are going away overnight to celebrate our tenth anniversary.

I figure, we might as well have some fun while we still like each other.

The Book That Took Over My Life

For the past two months, our church book club's mission has been to read Ken Follet's best-seller (and Oprah book) Pillars of the Earth. We took two months to read it, because it is 973 pages, after all (seems long but doesn't compete with Les Miserables, which I started last summer on the way to Paris, and which is 1463 pages in the Signet edition).

I did start, dutifully, sometime in June. But it was a big book, and there was VBS, and there were a couple of funerals, and I didn't want to take the book on vacation with me. And, to be perfectly honest with you, I felt sort of resentful of this big book, and it didn't really grab me at the beginning the way people told me it would. I just wanted to keep reading Maisie Dobbs.

But after three Maisie Dobbs mysteries, I saw the handwriting on the wall, and returned to the Middle Ages, to Tom Builder, and Prior Philip and Aliena (as well as the evil characters: William Hamleigh, Bishop Waleran, and various and sundry other unsavory characters). I was still rebelling in my heart, but I did want to discuss the book with the book group, and I was also seized with another emotion: "I will NOT let this book defeat me!" I said to my husband.

You see, as of Sunday, I was only three hundred pages into this book.

But tonight, I finished it.

It is book #26.

I will say this about it: it's not great literature. It's not Les Miserables, which I still want to read, although I might have to take a sabbatical to do it. The characters don't have too many more dimensions than one. Prude that I am, I did think some of the sex and violence was gratuitous.

But it's a good story. And how can you not love a story that has building a cathedral at the heart of it?

The Power Within Us: A Story From My Sermon This Morning

My sermon was based on Ephesians 3:14-21, I told and did not read this story, but thought I would share it with you...)

What does this deeply rooted and grounded power look like?......

I was invited to go to the Capital one day this week, to be part of a group of pastors and other leaders, and to go with a group construction workers, trained at a place called Summit Academy, which especially trains women and minorities for this kind of work. This kind of training is a way out of poverty for people, because, as the director of Summit Academy says, "The best social service program in the world is a job." But even though it is construction season in Minnesota, and even though there is more work than ever because of the Federal Stimulus dollars coming to us, the Summit Academy people have not been able to get work with the Minnesota Department of Transportation. So we were there to talk to the Commissioner about hiring some of these trained people. We prayed, a couple of the leaders testified, and then one person started to lead us all in a song, an old song from the civil rights movement, called "Ain’t gonna let nobody turn me around, turn me around, turn me around...." I didn't know it before we started, but I knew it by time we were done!



There are a lot of verses in this song, but one of them that kept recurring is "Ain't gonna let the jail house turn me around..." and I have to say, I was a little annoyed by this, because I don’t want to go to jail. I wasn't sure what was so compelling about the jailhouse. Because deep within me, I was thinking, BAD people go to jail. Good people don’t go to jail.

At one point I could hear this young African-American man, wearing a construction helmet (so I knew he was one of the workers) say, "Sing the jailhouse one!", and then turn to his friend and say, "That’s my favorite verse."

And though I am in no way advocating jail, I did later reflect that there have been some occasions and in some communities where good people have gone to jail:

The apostle Paul, for example,
the women who were suffragettes, advocating for women’s right to vote,
Dr. Martin Luther King and others in the civil rights movement.

They were rooted and grounded in something they knew was right, something they believed in,
but sometimes there were setbacks, and sometimes they experienced conflict and failure, and sometimes they even went to jail.

So the apostle encourages us to know, in the times when we are discouraged, in the times when we have failed, in the times when we are in jail, even jails of our own making
– that there is a power at work within us, a power at work within us building something greater than we can imagine.
There is a point at work within us, in the great works that we do, and in our ordinary, small daily lives,
and that is the power of the love of God, that is the power of Jesus, it is the power that kept Jesus going on the way to the cross, and it is the power that raised him to life.
It is the power of God’s love, and it is working in prisons and in schools and in households and in neighborhoods, and inside human hearts, healing, uniting, bringing God's mercy and peace..

700 Posts: Caption Contest

This is my 700th post. Amazing, isn't it?

In honor of this post, I thought I would post this picture of my dad when he was a little boy. He grew up in the Cedar-Riverside and Seward neighborhoods of Minneapolis (where the Swedes lived).

This picture hung on the hallway down to the basement in our house; I've always loved it for its uniqueness -- it just seems like such a slice of life, in so many ways. And I love for for what I don't know about it -- I really don't know much about the story behind this picture.

There's my dad, carrying this dog up the sidewalk. It's probably somewhere near downtown Minneapolis in the 1930s. I know that my dad liked dogs. He told me once that he brought a dog home that he had found somewhere, but it cried all night and his parents made him take it back where-ever he found it.

But this was not that dog. That dog was a Lab. The dog in this picture was not his dog. I don't know why he was carrying it. I don't know what happened to it. I don't have any idea who took the picture (except that no one from the family took the picture).

I also love this picture because it's from a disappeared time and place. My dad used to tell me on occasion that the house he grew up in didn't exist any more. It was torn down, as was part of his neighborhood, when Interstate 94 was built. I don't think I appreciated what it meant to him to know that his past had been torn down, bull-dozed, was just GONE.

Since this is a picture without a story, and in honor of my 700th post, I'd love if, again, creative people would suggest a caption for this. Also, any speculation you might have about this picture would be fascinating to me.

P.S. There will be a prize, but I don't know what what it will be.

My Name is not "Those People"

By poet, singer, prophet, social activist Julia Dinsmore

I posted about her book My Name is Child of God...Not Those People previously.

The title poem was written after Julia's encounter with a church committee. A group of people had gone to a rather large congregation, asking them to partner with some homeless people to buy a home. The congregation's group said "No," and one of the committee members said to them, "Those people don't need homes. We give them turkeys at Thanksgiving."

Julia's poem has become very well-known, and has been recited in many different venues, often without attribution or Julia receiving any remuneration. I'm glad she's finally getting some recognition for her work.

Praying

The week is getting away from me already, and it's only Tuesday. By this I mean, I had been dreaming of extended, leisurely study and pondering time, as well as quality time with friends and parish members, as well as a couple of important and thought-provoking meetings. And when I was organizing the week, I thought it would all fit together nicely, but it looks a little frantic in places.

I am not carving out the writing (and especially poetry) time that I thought I would be carving out.

But I did take a nice walk in some soft rain this morning.

I did not sit down with the Scripture texts for quite as long as I thought I would this afternoon. I wove my way through all six chapters of Ephesians, on the way to focusing on the doxology of Ephesians 3.

But I did spend an extended time catching up with an old friend from seminary about everything under the sun, from theological passions to personal life updates. I have not done anything like this for a long time, and it felt like an extravagance, but a necessary one.

I got a little book recently, called These Days. It's small, hand-made, and contains a few prayers and poems for the Daily Office. I found it at the Minnesota Center for Book Arts.

My favorite poem right now is by my friend, Pastor Kae Evenson.

Gracious God,
There was a day when we asked who you were.
On that day, you turned your back to us.
"I am" you said, that's all.
There was a day when we asked you to show
us a miracle or two.
In return you asked us to follow you to Jerusalem.
On that day we did not know that strength is having
the courage for small, kind gestures.
And then there was the day when a small prayer
pulled through us like a thread, as taut and hopeful as light.
Forgive them, you said, for they do not know what they do.
Amen

In the meantime, in the space between your hopes and what the day becomes,
in the space between the time that blows through your fingers and the time that rests in your lap,
in the space between your good intentions and your not-so-good intentions,
I offer this poem to you.

Blessings