Wednesday, August 19, 2020            (today’s lectionary)
Spending Sunday with Angie
Talking with Mom on Sunday, I watched her fascination with my story of St. Paul’s dance with her in the wide sunlit expanse of her open mind, not once slipping on the polished wooden floor (Sunday’s devotion). With rapt interest she read all twelve pages of her case study of her son David (that’s me!) which she wrote for a master’s degree counseling class in 1979. She nailed me with adjectives in the “objective” part of her case study. “Artless, sentimental, carefree.” Well. That hasn’t changed!
She is ready for more memories next time. Decades ago when she was otherwise unoccupied, she put together dozens of scrapbooks for John, Mary Kay, and I. So I’ll bring one of those thick scrapbooks next time, turn on the tape recorder, and notice how we both smile and smile. For her this was a labor of love.
Should not mothers pasture their children?
Woe to the shepherds of Israel who have been pasturing themselves!
Should not shepherds, rather, pasture sheep?
They can even make scrapbooks for them and present them on Christmas – precious memories in time eventually appreciated?
For dinner we ate ginger lime chicken, marinated in mayonnaise with lime zest and fresh grated ginger that I grilled before I left, along with Margaret’s rice and Craig’s tomatoes, which she ate before anything else. Her appetizer was peanut butter filled pretzels, and for dessert she insisted that I heat up a cup of milk. Hot, not warm!
I did not expect to have these joyful moments together again. Knowing the house would be at least 85 degrees when I got there, seeing her sitting in her big chair, loving her surprise to see me when she “knew” I was coming, and watching her openness to almost anything … it all seemed just the same now as before June 2, when she tripped on her oxygen tube and fell on the way to bed.
Her helpers, Mary Kay, Kelly, Judy, John and I for now, are with her part of the morning and all of the evening. She can get herself to the bathroom, but she is less likely, I think, to prepare meals, so we do that for her. We eat together. I gave her evening meds. We push ourselves to do the opposite of the failed Israelite shepherds:
Do not just drink their milk and wear their wool
Instead strengthen the weak and heal the sick and bind up the injured.
We do now for her what she did then for all three of her kids, one way or another.
Bring back the stray and seek the lost, and DO NOT harshly lord it over them.
But I know all through her life she sometimes felt forsaken, never in all ways, but often in some way. ECT was a new therapy in the 50’s, but Dr. Zolt encouraged her, and it helped. Dad’s habits of silence and hard work, nurtured by working with his own dad, left Mom feeling more alone than she expected out in the pastoral landscape of rural east Lincoln.
My sheep were scattered over the whole earth with no one to look after them or search for them.
John needed complete blood transfusions as a baby, and then encountered diabetes when he was only six. Mom always wanted to be a nurse, and I’m guessing she over-cared for her youngest kid. But I know he not only survived but flourished, and continues to laugh with abandon, just as he did sixty years ago, when I tickled him as only a big brother could.
Mary Kay foundered at first, unsure about her boyfriends, changing colleges, moving too far away. Like Mom, Mary Kay suffered from Dad’s disinterest (or misplaced interest in work, or his psychologically lazy choice of work over women, whatever you want to call it). If I remember right, once at dinner, frustrated, he told her to go outside and eat grass, and she did. Hmmm.
As for me, I disappeared into clouds of marijuana at a Lutheran university after getting high scores on every college entrance test, then into an early marriage/divorce (two, actually), and finally into the inspirational spell of the full-time, never-see-your-parents-again Unification Church in California. Her letters, and even more her prayers, left me in the hands of God.
Those prayers worked, by the way.
God said, I will save my sheep!
I myself will look after and tend my sheep.
Mom watched all this, struggling to personalize her greatest lesson for me, found forever in Philippians 4:8. My acronym TNRPLAEP (click the link, look it up!) sustains me now, and I think her own acronym sustained her then.
*Â Â Â Â Â *Â Â Â Â Â *
On September 12, 2001 Betty, the HR director at the News-Gazette asked me, knowing I was ordained and all, to lead a prayer service twenty-four hours after the World Trade Center and Pentagon were destroyed by our own jetliners. Televising all this live, CNN allowed us to watch the jets plow into the buildings, and then look away too late as people jumped from floors on fire hundreds of feet in the air. I was driving to work and the news broke into the morning music. The News-Gazette printed an extra edition hours before the regular paper, and I helped distribute it to our hundred vending machines.
The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.
He maketh me to lie down in green pastures, he walks with me beside still waters.
He restores my soul.
It was a simple prayer service, and we shared a reading of the 23rd Psalm. Very quiet. A few personal prayers.
Even though I walk in the valley of the shadow of death I will fear no evil.
Since the Revolutionary War, so rarely has violence from without creased the quiet of our country. Like Britain for so long, we were protected by water and a variety of intimidations. We grew comfortable in that protection.
Your rod (whack me well, now and then) and your staff (guide me gently, precious Savior), they comfort me (and Lord knows, I need them both).
You prepare a table for me in the presence of my enemies.
I think the USA dropped the ball on that one and took on our own protection, prepared our own table, and using the name of God, multiplied the mistake of our supposed entitlement. We used a hammer to pound a tack, and twenty years later still pay the price. But that’s just what I think, not what God thinks. God keeps on blessing us anyway, every one of us, despite our red and blue stupidities. We all keep breathing, until we don’t. And then God breathes for us, forever.
Jesus reminds us in story after story that love is eternal, unconditional and always for everyone, everyone, everyone.
What if I wish to give the last one who worked just an hour
The same wage as the first, who worked ten? What is that to you?
Will you respond to my generosity by being envious?
This is what is true, folks, and I’ll say it over and over again:
The last will be first, and the first will be last.
Mom and Dad, John, Mary Kay and I are as guilty of the foolish sin of assuming our rights and entitlement as much as any other family. Lately, though, in her own quiet world, Mom in her 98 year flesh happily proves to us the love of God.
She survives with joy, alongside the sins of our family. She has the privilege of living in a nice house she designed in 1976. Forty-four years later the industrial carpets she chose then still look nearly new. She can wander with her walker all around the house without obstruction. She made good choices in a good design, looking toward the future.
And even in her entitlement, as unexpectedly foolish in her as it is in me, God does not punish her. He blesses her.
O God, you anoint her head with oil, and her cup overflows.
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow her all the days of her life.
And she will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.
           (Ezekiel 34, Psalm 23, Hebrews 4, Matthew 20)
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