PSYCH!
Turns out - Brent isn't really dead after all! He has been in San Jose vacationing! I recieved a PARKING TICKET that he got on June 16, 2008 for letting his parking meter run out!
Jan - at least it isn't a warrant for his arrest!
edited to say - ok! so he is still dead in body BUT quite alive with CHRIST!
ONE MORE EDIT: I called the ticet office in San Jose and the lady told me that it was a simple mistake of the ticket officer writing down the wrong liscense plate. That he must have messed up on one of the numbers. YEAH! Because even though I thought it was funny - I wasn't looking forward to the mess of dealing with it! Thank you, God for a little humor in my life!
9 comments:
What the heck. Any explanation how this happened?
Too hilarious. Sometimes I think our boys just like to keep us guessing!
Jan - I just kept thinking of Chuck and I was sooo glad that I got a funny letter like the one you got! Of course - it will be a pain to deal with BUT quite a chuckle indeed!
Flo- no explanation just yet! I need to call and find out BUT I think it has to do with that Taurus that overheated ALL the time and we donated it way back in 2000!
You are so Funny!
Patrick got an AARP thing in the mail. We thought it was a joke, but no one's fessed up yet. :)
We will be driving through Abq: Thurs. the 7th ~noon to afternoon. Then the 11th afternoon to evening.
It'd be great to see you and anyone else that reads this.
Humor is great and you always seem to find it. I love you!
that is really funny. brent would totally love that story! i've heard of this happening before.
Glad it's all taken care of.
And glad you got a laugh out of it!
How on earth did they find you, anyways? Where'd they get your out-of-California address?
never mind... that was a dumb question!:) it's the government- they can always find ya!
Wednesday, July 23, 2008
When bad things happen....
When someone threw open the back door and hollered that Levi’s hand had been caught in a barn fan, I envisioned blood.
Those moments running across the yard, skirt catching around my ankles, I steeled myself. Flesh and bone would be sheered, Levi would be howling, the pain a searing wildfire. I could hardly imagine how those fan blades, 2 feet long, 2 pounds each, whirring at deafening, blinding speeds, might hack up a little boy’s hand. Or just hatchet it off.
Three hours later, my Mama met us in the lane, us home from ER.
I smoothed out the worried angst scribbled across her forehead. “He’s got all of his fingers, no stitches necessary.”
I open the door to help Levi out of the passenger seat. “The bones of the index finger are crushed and we’ll have to see a surgeon.” Levi holds up his splinted, bandaged hand to show Gram.
“But he’s got a hand!”
The tension lines loosen. Mama’s shoulders relax and she breathes.
“God’s grace,” she whispers. “God’s grace.” She pats my arm and I feel her relief.
I am guiding Levi into the house and rest and words come but I refuse them voice, dare not say what surges close the surface. “And if he’d lost his hand, what of God’s grace then?”
Can we ask these questions?
Because I know that as I get a pillow for Levi who’s cried out and swollen, the mother of a neighborhood 13-year-old is standing beside her son’s body resting in a coffin, the hole dug in the graveyard. Last week her boy had cut the grass at their country Mennonite church. This week, a farm accident has them reading his obituary over the radio at noon and his mother’s heart quietly cracking, a delta of fractures spreading.
I pull a blanket up over a weary Levi and wonder. Does anyone whisper in the neighbor’s house, “God’s grace, God’s grace”?
Surely God was watching over both boys. Surely He heard our prayers for our sons this week, our prayers since the day we knew of their unfurling in utero. Surely He is good. And He gave. God’s grace?
I think of my Dad, and the day he stood by earth’s gaping mouth and they lowered down the pint-sized coffin of his daughter. Was God drowsing the day the truck’s weight crushed her lungs, her skull? Was an Omnipotent God impotent that day, powerless to turn a steering wheel, save a child? Do I believe in a mostly indifferent, distant God who rouses himself only now and then to spill a bit of benevolence on a hemorrhaging humanity? A weak God who only breaks through the carapace of this orb by chance, surprising us with a drop or two of grace, a spared hand, a reprieve from pain, and then finds himself again helpless, limp?
Do we think that is an easier God to worship than the alternative?
The phone rings and it’s my brother-in-law with news of the neighboring family's funeral arrangements.
“John, I can’t fathom that kind of grief. Or why.” I don’t say how uncomfortable I feel that our son sleeps on the couch, whole and here. How we don’t deserve this.
“I spoke to an uncle of the boy yesterday.” John’s voice is certain. “The family really has peace. They look at how it all happened, all these atypical events that seemed to coordinate, and how even just one circumstance could have changed the outcome.” Levi stirs on the couch.
“They seem to accept that it was meant to be this way.”
Incomprehensibly, they too say it: God’s grace, God’s grace. The unwavering faith of fissured hearts that can stand in funeral parlors and say, “The Lord gives and the Lord takes, blessed be the name of the Lord.” The kind of granite faith that says “Shall we accept good from God, and not trouble?... “Though the fig tree should not blossom, nor fruit be on the vines… and the fields yield no food… yet I will rejoice in the Lord” (Hab. 3:17-18).
Do I know that kind of faith?
I speak of God’s grace when we wake healthy, when rain falls on our fields, when we fill our plates and stomachs. But what if my bones were pitted with agony, our crops wilted in parched ground, our children’s bellies swelled with starvation? What of God’s grace then?
If I reject the notion of a God who generally remains aloof (or powerless), one who only randomly intervenes with a meager sprinkling of grace, I am left face to face with a God who gives grace and saves my child’s hand… and gives grace and let’s a child die.
I am left with the alternative: a God who gives what I may not perceive as good. Is that the essence of who God is? Is such a God worthy of worship?
On worn, water-splattered cue cards, I can hardly make out the inked words I wrote down years ago, have carried through hard times, fingered on dark nights. “Surely, just as I have intended, so it has happened, and just as I have planned so it will stand” (Isa. 14:24). A sovereign God who intends, whose plans stand.
I flip the card, make out the words on the back side, ““See now that I, I am he, and there is no god besides Me; It is I who put to death and give life. I have wounded and it is I who heal” (Deu. 32:39). I praise Him for the grace of life, the goodness of healing. How do I understand that He too puts to death, that it is He who wounds?
And the text of a new card, fresh and clear, (the tattered one finally wore away), words I know to be the crux of all that is: “And [Eli] said, ‘It is the Lord; let Him do what seems good to Him’” (1 Sam. 3:18).
The elemental essence of the cosmos distills to this: He who orchestrates the incremental, finite details of this universe does what seems good to Him. Not to us. To us it may seem catastrophic, hideous, nauseating. Pint-sized coffins, wandering orphans, monster tsunamis; the stuff of a sin-ravaged, pain-pussing planet. But the heart of God pulses at its gory center.
“What is needed, then, is to see God in everything, and to receive everything directly from His hands, with no intervention of second causes…,” writes Hannah Whitall Smith in 1875. “To the children of God everything comes directly from their Father’s hand, no matter who or what may have been the apparent agents.”
The fingerprints of God smudge everything. His heart beats everywhere. The contours of His face surface in every moment. I confess: something in me recoils when I think of hurricanes and floating corpses, dark corners and violated innocence, splintered souls and mossy gravestones.
But I am left with the haunting question, echoing off soul walls: Do I take it not as cliché but as stone truth, believing in the marrow of my frame, that He’s meaning it all for good (Gen 50:20), persistently working all things together for good (Ro. 8:28)? That He is who He says He is: good. He claims to be a God of “light and in Him is no darkness at all” (1 Jn. 1:5). Can I take Him at His Word? Haven't I known Him as the light piercing through my pitch, the beam penetrating all that cloaks and smothers. And I trust His heart, His Word: He does not “willingly bring affliction or grief to the children of men” (Lam. 3:33).
The chairs are hard, the walls bare, sitting in the surgeon’s waiting room. Levi is staring out the one window and I am fingering circles through his brush cut, looking out too. And I'm thinking again on that story Max Lucado tells, the tale told of the man whose horse ran away and his neighbors loudly bemoaned his loss. The worn farmer merely says, “We’ll see.”
When the horse surprisingly return the next day, leading with him three wild horses, the neighbors extol such bountiful blessing. To which the wrinkled sage merely says, “We’ll see.”
Not so many days later, the son of the farmer was laid up with a broken leg, the result of trying to break in one of the undomesticated horses. Neighbors offer their condolences on such a bad turn of events. The farmer responds characteristically: “We’ll see.”
Shortly thereafter, all young men in the district were drafted into the state army. Except for the farmer’s son. He’s still limping about with broken leg.
Levi fiddles with his splint and I wait to hear a nurse summon his name and think how our story isn’t over. We'll have to see. What may seem good to us may actually be but means to lead us to a better good---that seems more painful.
What may seem adverse to us, in the plot line of the Storyteller, is for our ultimate betterment.
God’s story lines in the lives of His children are formulaic: they are all good. The events may jarringly twist and surprise, even seem to pry out our heart, chunk by mangled chunk, but, in the fullness of time, there are no bad endings.
And I am still thinking on that 15 minutes later, sitting in a white and chrome room, the surgeon explaining that the bones in Levi’s index finger are broken and contorted such that they will need to open up the finger, rebreak, and align bones with wires. Nerve damage from the surgery is a real possibility. Mobility is not certain. Physiotherapy is.
It’s a small act and I hardly dare to even call it practice, this saying, “It is the Lord, let him do what seems good to Him.” For there’s nothing terminal here, nothing heinous, nothing even that remarkable. A four inch piece of skin, a three hour surgery, a bit of pain (possibly more) later. While minefields tear off limbs and scalpels carve cancerous breasts off chests, babies weakly cry for milk…and then fall silent. And a Mennonite mother down the road grieves over turned sod, a face she can't touch.
Yet even this is practice, as trivial as it seems. This is daily soul-stretching, the exercise of bending knee to His Sovereign perfect will. This learning to say, "All is grace.”
Regardless, nonetheless, always: "God's grace, God's grace."
'All that happens becomes bread to nourish, soap to cleanse, fire to purify, a chisel to carve heavenly features. Everything is a channel of His Grace.'
I thought of you when I read this...I hope it's okay for me to share it here...
Love, Denise
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