Eating Right September 30, 2011

It was a hot, hot summer day.  I’d had an active morning with my grandchildren and the two and a half year old was definitely feeling the need for bed and nummy, until…we passed a Farmer’s Market with its brightly coloured  jewels on tables and stacked on the grass under make-shift roofs interspersed with big trucks and flitting, chattering people. He was entranced, oblivious to the humid heat that wet the hair around his forehead and blushed his cheeks.  We bought $60.00 worth of treasures in no time at all, savoured them for a week and never passed that spot again without his remembering.

The Ottawa Citizen recently reported that if every household in Ontario spent just $10 per week on locally grown food, not only would families realize monthly cost savings but it would also create an estimated 10,000 jobs in the province.

Did you know? July 14, 2011

Canada has an office of Religious Freedom. It has three tasks: to monitor religious freedom around the world; to promote religious freedom as a key objective of Canadian foreign policy; to advance policies and programs that support religious freedom around the world.

Little by Little July 2, 2011

I began having little Charlie at my house a couple of days a week when my daughter went back to work a year ago last January.  He had just turned one and was a completely charming, very busy little boy.  When he had his nap, I had a nap too.  It was the only way to get through the rest of the day.

Now, a year and half later, I’m caring for him everyday.  This time we are at his home where Daddy spends most of his day resting while his body re-calibrates itself to accommodate the newly transplanted stem cells that make his blood and dominate bodily functions.  Once again, when Charlie has his nap, I have mine.

At night, when I look in on him before going to bed myself, I marvel. It’s strange to see him still, except for the whisper of regular, even belly breaths.  His body is still rounded, but long now.  How did the squirming baby in my arms become this size?

I recall the same wondering amazement from thirty-five years ago with my own children.  At that time I put my feelings into words which became, in turn, my first published piece of writing.  The back cover of Decision magazine had an illustration by Nathan Greener on the top half of the page and my words on the bottom half. It was a lovely beginning for a budding writer and a reminder of truths that have followed me through the intervening years.

In the dim light from the upstairs hall, I tuck my sleeping children into bed.

I run my finger over Alex’s freckled nose and kiss the forehead under tousled hair as I pull up the sheet.  Feeling the sharpness of his shoulder blade, I have to wonder.

My hand is the same one that encompassed half his baby body 10 years ago.  How could that round bundle and this collection of skin and long bones be the same?

In the gray fatigue of early motherhood, I sterilized bottles and changed diapers.  Later I prepared baby food and played with blocks, then guided tricycles cross the street, and now I attend soccer games.

Somehow, so slowly that I can’t see it from day to day, the wonder of growth occurs.  I know what happens, but I don’t understand how it happens.  The change from baby to boy is as much a mystery and miracle to me as the rhythm of the seasons or the green that curls out of a dry bean.

Have I grown in 10 years?  I know I haven’t grown taller.  But have I grown inside where it matters? I wonder if I am kinder than I was 10 years ago, more patient.  Am I more able to see people as they really are? Do I have more skill in reaching out to help them?

Do I understand myself better? Can I see me the way God sees me, knowing as I am known?

How does God nurture these qualities in me? How does He turn a crying baby Christian into an adult of grace? Though that too is a mystery and a miracle to me, I know that he uses family and friends to nourish me with love and encouragement. He sends good books for ideas and energy. He exercises me on the little trials and big troubles that I meet. He reminds me of his salvation, so that I always have hope.

Little by little I change. It happens slowly. From day to day I don’t see the difference. But it happens!

Someday, from the vantage point of eternity, I will be able to put a measuring tape to that growth and will marvel at the wonder of how He did it.

June 28, 2011

Peter Kazmaier has just posted an interview with me on his blog.  Check it out at http://peterkazmaier.com/?p=684

We Have Always Been a Family of Waterbearers June 20, 2011

We Have Always Been a Family of Water Bearers

I remember my father kneeling in grey Sunday pants and Stetson hat at the tap beside the back door filling a five gallon cream can for the Bell girls.  Their insides couldn’t stand Walkerton water.  He hoisted it onto the back seat of our old blue Chev.  We watched it sweat, felt the radiating cold, then heard three women, powdery with age, chorus their thanks as he carried it down into their dim basement, filled clay crocks and covered them with linen towels.

My children

run

through gnat-like stings

of early summer rain

to throw themselves

into the lake.

They scrabble over

and under

an enormous black tube,

duck

through waves,

emerge

with hair slick,

do not notice

pelting drops.

My mother, alone now in the cottage that was her mother’s, has well-water flavoured by rocks and sand.  It spoils her coffee, it stains the sides of her new marble sink.  So we carry plastic vinegar jugs when we go to town.  Today, crouching beside a public tap, rain smacks my back, spots my pants, joins with tap water to run over my sandals, down the walk, down towards the lake.

A Sunday Morning Quote June 9, 2011

Quoting Rev. Wayne Kleinsteuber from a message given to Malvern Presbyterian Church, May 22, 2011

“The validity of ministry is that it is accompanied by visible signs that God is present and acting.”

“The Church is not a memorial society for someone who died 2000 years ago.  It is the living Body of Christ.

At Dawn May 25, 2011

waves

whisper and echo,

crack, splash, slurp,

rattle like a stick

across a washboard.

Extraordinary thoughts break

on the shore

of a calm lake.

See this poem  in From the Cottage Porch, an anthology published by Sunshine in a Jar, released May 7, 2011.  You would also enjoy “Tadpole” an award-winning story by Susan Lynn Reynolds.

Fully green May 19, 2011

Yesterday, between morning and evening, the tree in front of our house came completely into leaf.  It happens like that sometimes.

I’m missing my garden this year May 17, 2011

My quick dashes in and out of my house, usually on the way to somewhere else, are nothing like the slow savouring that I usually enjoy once buds swell on the trees and leaves stretch through the soil.  No long letters to my mother this year detailing the slow growth of new life, comparing the progress of red maples in my front and back yards.

I didn’t even get leaves raked, last fall or this spring.  And frost-hardened old growth still spiked upward for a truly woe-begone look.  Not my favourite.

Time to take action.

I ordered a yard of mushroom compost to be delivered one morning.  I had about forty minutes of “help” from my favourite two-year-old, then worked feverishly while he slept to get it off my driveway and onto the pitiful front garden.  It was lovely to have Debbie stop by to chat but I was glad she understood why I didn’t stop working as we talked.

What a difference when I finished!  It looked freshly dug–loved and cared for.

When the baby monitor signaled that my time was up, I quickly wheeled the last barrow of compost into the garage, packed us into the car and drove back to meet the school bus at  my “other home”. No lingering to admire aesthetics today.

I do miss my garden.

My daughter misses her children.

REVERSED THUNDER by Eugene H. Peterson May 17, 2011

FAMOUS LAST WORDS FROM THE BOOK OF THE REVELATION (WHICH IS THE LAST OF THE WRITTEN WORDS FOUND IN THE BIBLE)

THE LAST WORD ON SCRIPTURE:

Page 17: “The sensory imagination is sacramental; it makes connections between what is sensed and what is  believed.”

THE LAST WORD ON CHRIST:

Page 26: “Jesus is both the content of the revelation and the agent of the revelation.  Jesus Christ is the way in which God reveals himself to us; Jesus Christ is also God himself being revealed to us.”

Page 32: “Churches are characteristically poor, often sordid, frequently faithless…God deliberately set Jesus among the common and the flawed.”

THE LAST WORD ON EVIL

Page 85: “…the bible does not provide an explanation of evil–rather, it defines a context: all evil takes place in an historical arena bounded by Christ and prayer.  Evil is not explained but surrounded.”

THE LAST WORD ON PRAYER

Page 98: “The exodus plagues were not punitive but purgative, sent not simply to make Pharoah miserable, but to get him to change his mind, to repent.”

THE LAST WORD ON WITNESS

Page 111: The Revelation is, in large part, a provisioning of the imagination to take seriously the dangers at the same time that it receives exuberantly the securities, and so to stand in the midst of and against evil.”

Page 111: “Christians at worship find their place in a cosmos of redemption…”

Page 113: “Law (Moses) is the revelation of God’s truth.  God wills us to know what is real…Prophecy (Elijah) is the immediate application of God’s truth in current and personal history…Prophecy is the call to live the revealed truth.”

Page 114: “Prophecy points out connections between dailiness and God’s eternity and calls us to choose to live these connections…Prophecy addresses our wills with an invitation to participate in God’s will…Law tells us how God is involved in our lives.  Prophecy tells us how we are involved in God’s life…[Law and prophecy] point to the Christ who reveals all of God to us, and to the Christ who is our total response to God.”

THE LAST WORD ON POLITICS

Page 125: “Endurance and faith are aggressive forces in the battle raging between God and the devil.”

THE LAST WORD ON JUDGEMENT

Page 140: “…worship is the act in which we are reoriented contextually.  Worship is the essential and central act of the Christian.”

THE LAST WORD ON SALVATION

Page 153:  “If there is no accurate perception of catastrophe, there can be no adequate perception of salvation, for salvation is God’s action that deals with the catastrophe.”

Page 153: “The root meaning in Hebrew of “salvation” is to be broad, to become spacious, to enlarge.  It carries the sense of deliverance from an existence that has become compressed, confined, and cramped.”

Page 157: “What we know and believe of Christ in his incarnation, and what we expect and hope of Chirst in his coming again, brackets our present lives.”

Page 157: “I maintain continuity with the killed and raised Jesus who is salvation, not by learning something or by performing something, but by eating a meal.  The eucharistic meal uses the everyday elements of the common life to connect me with the extraordinary and unique crucifixion and resurrection of  Jesus.”

THE LAST WORD ON HEAVEN

Page 172: “Heaven is not what we wait for until the future or where we go when we die, but what IS, barely out of the range of our senses.”

Page 172: “The vision of heaven is not the promise of anything other than what we have already received by faith; it does, through, promise more, namely, its completion.”

Page 172: “Heaven is not fantasy.  We have access to heaven now: it is the invisibility in which we are immersed, and that is developing into visibility, and that one day will be thoroughly visible.”

Page 181: “Evil…starves us of what we need to live, while it surfeits us with what we don’t need, masking our need.”

Page 185: “If we don’t want God or don’t want him very near, we can hardly be very interested in heaven.”