Last Saturday in March

Two Saturdays ago I did the wedding ceremony for a family; they are our friends and I was glad to do the wedding. It was held outdoors, in a place that I had never been and I had to do it with most of the people not knowing that I had a sight problem. Anita walked me to my place and I sat on a stool or leaned on it to do the ceremony. I told them that I was blind and that the service may have some unplanned and original vows in it. That took care of them wondering about me and allowed them to focus on that young and gorgeous couple; all of youth is mostly gorgeous and that is one of the pleasures of a wedding ceremony. I managed to conduct my part without making any major or embarrassing mistakes so that was a plus for me; and I enjoyed doing it and had a sense of accomplishment about it.

Last Saturday, Anita and I went to the memorial service for Linda Sciple, our next-door neighbor and friend of many years. I was determined to be there and I am glad that I made the effort. The service began with a duet between piano and pipe organ and it was simply magnificent. It took me to a level that I could not reach without that grand music to help get us there. It set the mood for the entire service. The pipe organ is one thing. But the soaring elegance of a pipe organ played by someone who really knows how to play it can add all kinds of positives to a service. I used to go to choir practice just to hear that pipe organ we had played in practice. But it did add much majesty to a very nice service in memory of a very nice person and I was most glad to be there to honor her memory and friendship.

On Easter Sunday, I will get to baptize an infant. I saw this mother grow up in the church I served; I saw her honored as a high school and college graduate; I conducted her marriage ceremony; and I will get to baptize her daughter next Sunday. That kind of connectedness means a lot to me and I have had and still have a number of families that I enjoy that kind of relationship over the span of years. I just wish that I could see this young baby girl; but I will be able to touch her and hear her if this sacrament goes like many do. Often the infant isn’t really glad to be there and have water dribbled on her head; she just might complain about it. Still it will be a very nice Sunday and give a real positive push to the day. I might even get a haircut and take a shower in honor of what will be happening. Shows to go, you just never can tell.

This Saturday, Casey is changing some fascia boards on the front of the house. Anita is going to roll my chair out under the big oak tree and I will walk around the sidewalk, find the chair and stay out there under the tree giving him advice. The AC people are coming Monday to replace our over twenty-year-old AC system. It is just time to do it and we thought we might as well get it done and over with. That will set us up to have replaced all major systems in the house and we will coast on out of here with a house as reliable as we can make it. Casey sure does spend some time keeping us going and we are glad to have such a do-it-all-well guy available at a reasonable cost.

Later today we will take a lunch break of fried chicken and biscuits. Tim, Steve, Casey, Anita and me will get grub for the crew and have a good excuse to have fried chicken. Then later on we will go to our book study. We are going to study a book titled Jesus Interrupted. A PhD scholar in biblical history wrote it. The work crew has arrived so I will take a break and get on with my supervising duties and get back to writing more of this later. Hope you can wait till I get going again.

The book study is written by an author who began on the far right as a biblical literalist. Every word in the Bible was dictated by God and therefore there could be absolutely nothing out of phase or order in it. No mistakes, no scientific error, no inconsistencies, no contradictions, no nothing. He went on to get a PhD in biblical studies, history and interpretation; that got him in trouble. He found out more about the Bible than he wanted to find and it confounded him, as it will most biblical literalists, and he felt his whole fabric of faith beginning to tear. His inflexible and rigid interpretation of Bible, biblical literature, perfection, scientific accuracy became harder and harder to support. I think that he defined God and the Bible as one and interchangeable; he worshipped God and he also worshipped the Bible. I think that it is clearer to say for me that I worship the God revealed in the Bible, not God and the Bible. I think the Bible reveals God and it does that through the inspiration given to the writers to write the story of faith as they lived it.

The God revealed in the Bible is still the God of Christmas and Easter; he is still the God who loves us and gives us the miracle of his grace. To ask the Bible to be God is simply asking too much of the Bible and too little of God. Finding out the faith through knowing how faith moved down through the centuries is inspiring. To know that the faith is not confined to only the pages of a book that is written by humans, living in a world that they experienced, and having that become a channel of God’s grace today is simply stunning. The Bible doesn’t have to be God in order for God to be God. But the author couldn’t make that distinction so he slowly moved to believer, agnostic, and now atheist. I am glad that God is not limited to the pages of a book, but is a God that uses that Bible to reveal himself today. I keep reminding myself of that whenever life today gets a little too confusing.

This is Holy Week. It is a nice Tuesday morning and is very quiet in our subdivision. The Scotties are resting right now and are waiting for an opportunity to alert me to an alien presence. Belle started doing that at 2 a.m. and I wondered what was setting her off. Ralph got up and looked around but went back to bed. I guess he couldn’t define what the threat was, so back to bed. Eventually Belle settled down but it was after 3 a.m. before she did so. We had a new AC system installed yesterday with plenty of noise and confusion and strangers. That probably upset her because Anita said she was barking at the pull down stairs leading to the attic. That was where those guys spent much time making noise; I guess she wanted to make sure that they still weren’t up there. Anita is off to her drawing group today and I am here with the Scotties. So far all is well.

March Mayhem

Here we are in the middle of March. It is surprising to me how rapidly the days go by; sunrise, sunset, quickly flow the day, from the words of Fiddler on the Roof. And that movement even includes those times when we find ourselves singing the blues in the night. Anita has gone to help Dorian bathe and clip the two watch Scotties and I am here manning the ramparts by myself. Things can be rather quiet when I am here by myself. I had to have a short fight with my memory and the computer to get this blog started but I did it and I did it by myself in the dark; so there is some sense of accomplishment that I am now doing what I started out to do.

I have studied my meditation for tomorrow and am now doing this blog entry and will wander around the house in a few more moments just to get myself moving. I can hear some typing mistakes but that ought to make your interpretation interesting. I will edit in a few hours and try to make this entry more readable.

Last Saturday, I had a wedding in a setting that I had not been before. It worked out fine and I did the job without making the service memorable by my mistakes. Weddings and funerals are always tense and me doing them blind makes my tension even higher; I want to respond when I am asked but I surely want to be able to conduct their service with dignity. So far I have been able to do that but I feel pretty tired when the service is over and I am always glad to finish and be on my way home. I simply refuse to give in; you don’t give in, you just keep getting up. I keep telling myself to never give up and so far I haven’t given up.

The wedding used that marvelous Pauline description of love as a part of the service (First Corinthians, chapters 12-13). I imagine that it is used at almost every wedding because it is so appropriate. It is so popular and appealing that we can miss the muscular message that it contains. Right from the beginning of the poem Paul makes it clear that if love is not present, heroic deeds will not rescue our relationship or us. Love is neither pale nor weak.

Even moving mountains and making great sacrifices won’t get the job done. Muscular love is required to make the deed, however dazzling, really mean anything. The muscle of the love in the poem says that. Love is not about heroic acts or moving mountains or stringing banners across the sky. Love is about common courtesy and mutual respect; that is what muscular love gives to life and to relationships. The grand gestures and noble deeds are nothing without courtesy grace and respect.

And those three ingredients are sadly missing in many, if not most, of the relationships we encounter in everyday living. Our politics seems to run on hate for the opposite viewpoint rather than finding a common love and concern for country. And the fact that we citizens allow this to continue day after day without a significant confrontation to our government stuns and surprises me. Muscular love is about how we treat each other every day, in every situation we encounter that day, about every person we encounter that day.

Love is not about being heroic and winning every situation we encounter. Muscular love is seeing to it that we all win because when your partner wins, we all win. Whether person, family, job, or church, love is about approaching life and others with courtesy and respect. I hope that I can remember that and I also hope that our culture remembers it. Enduring, believing, and hoping for all good things are living with a muscular love that can make a big difference.