Archive for September, 2009

In 50 Feet Turn Right

Monday, September 28th, 2009

The first time I had a lovely electronic voice directing me was in my brand new 1986 Maxima sedan.  Her voice was calming and assuring.  She told me several very useful things like, “buckle your seatbelt, please,” and “a door is open.”  She also told me when lights were left on or the brakes were set (anyone remember setting the brakes in a car??).  We didn’t have any voices in our next car, a Chrysler mini-van, only annoying lights, loud dinging tones, and cars that wouldn’t start if you ignored those error messages.  I missed my polite lady.

And then came the advent of GPS in my car.  My polite lady was back.  I named her “Gypsy” because we wandered all over the planet together and she keeps me right on track!  Do you remember that ad a few years back when a guy in a car made a right hand turn right through the plate glass window of a store because his GPS had said “Turn right………..in 50 feet?”  Well, I am happy to say they have corrected that problem.  My Gypsy says, “In 50 feet turn right” so I know it is not immediate.  My new Gypsy Nuvi now also tells me the name of the street where I should turn right and bless her little heart, yesterday she even let me know that I was not on the road.  Well, of course I wasn’t, I was in the middle of the self-storage unit area.  Furthermore, my Gypsy shows me roads and road names, water, and watering places, hospitals, shopping, car repair service and a host of places I never even knew existed.  When traveling in a metro area she will even give me traffic alerts and show me how to detour around them.  She is simply the best.  I feel safe and secure with her guiding me as we wander together.

I often wish that my Christian life could be so ordered and so directed.  I wish the Bible would say things to me like, “and this passage means that you should do…fill in the blank,” or maybe “the kingdom of God is within you means…fill in the blank.”  But alas it doesn’t and so I am often left to wonder things like “What would Jesus do?” or “What did Jesus mean?”  And when I ponder these things I also wonder if maybe what I’ve discerned is wrong?  It can be so confusing from time to time.  If only I had a Bible Gypsy!

And then I recall my favorite Psalm 62 verse 1 – “For God alone my soul in silence waits; from God comes my salvation.”  In silence my answers will come.  Silence is hard for me.  And what if God won’t let me in on the secrets of the universe or the words of the Gospel?  Or, heaven forbid, I don’t understand the message?  I could wander around in spiritual ignorance forever.  It is at these times that I hear my spiritual Gypsy saying, “Trust in God…in 50 feet turn right!”  AMEN!

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Who’s Running the Asylum

Wednesday, September 23rd, 2009

After a  ten hour day serving the church I grabbed two nano-seconds to glance over the paper the other day.  I was struck by an article that caused me to slow down and ponder the question of who is running the asylum.

Seems an insane murderer was taken by the prison personnel to visit a nearby country festival.  Taking an insane imprisoned murderer out on a field trip is bizzare enough, but this particular person also escaped from whomever was supposed to be keeping an eye on him.  For three days he was lost before he was found.  Sort of like one of those lost sheep Jesus tells us we should go out and seek to bring back into the fold.  I couldn’t agree more.

We keep sheep in a pen for a variety of reasons, the main one being so that they will not run away and are kept safe from snarling, hungry wolves.  Why then would any sane person think it wise to take an insane murdering sheep out of the pen for a joy ride and a trip to the fair?  Of course, my imagination wanders all over creation on that one and I think “well, maybe it was a trial trip to see if he behaved himself.”  “Or, maybe he had been a model prisoner and earned the trip to the festivities.’”    What were they thinking?  Gratefully, the lost sheep was found and returned to the sheep pen to hopefully be kept safe and, dare  I say, sound.   I think I am going to stop trying to figure out who is running the world.  It is quite obvious it is the inmates!  God help us all.

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If I were God

Wednesday, September 16th, 2009

From time to time I ponder what this world would look like if I were God.  I have even toyed with some thoughts on Facebook, but still, I ponder.  Of course, if I were God there would be no evil, no war, no abuse, no poverty, boundless love, and on and on with all the good stuff.  That is something I believe that we would all like to see on this fragile planet.  But, what I think about are the little things.  Those nitty, gritty, nasty little things that get in the way of a perfect moment or a perfect day.  Like, why does my dog always have to poop all over himself every time I take him someplace special (that is, not to the vet or the groomer)?  So, here are a few things I would change if….I…were….God:

  • No one would ever have a bad hair day.
  • It would never rain on a picnic or a parade.
  • Telemarketers would never call at dinner time.
  • Mice would stay outside.
  • Everyone’s breath would always be clean and fresh.
  • Spaghetti would never dribble down on a white shirt, blouse, or dress.
  • All teen-ager’s rooms would be neat and clean.
  • A pencil and paper would always be handy when you needed it.
  • No one would ever misplace their keys or their eye-glasses.
  • Weeds would only grow where they were wanted.

Well, I could go on and on and on, but I think I’ll save some for another blog.  For now I will just go on believing in miracles, loving life, laughing much, living well, and trusting that my friend, Jesus, will keep me and my family healthy, happy, and able to give what we can to make this a better world.

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What is scary about blogs

Thursday, September 10th, 2009

 It has only been five days since I started this blog and already I have this scary feeling that I will never be able to keep up.  I have always considered myself a woman never at a loss for words and I am certain that my friends would agree.  But….all of a sudden I am sitting here staring at my computer screen and feeling helpless – no words, no topics, just blank!  In my mind writing a blog would be fun.  I have so many things rattling around in my head I thought it would be easy to drop them onto the page.  Well, I have found it isn’t that easy, it’s scary.

I read somewhere that if you start a blog you really should write something on it regularly.  Like, I guess, maybe every other day, twice a week?  Once a week?  It is scary thinking that at least once a week you have to write.  That is very different from just writing whenever you want to, or feel like it, or are super inspired.  It feels like a deadline.  Pressure.  Tension.  Stress.  I must pray harder that I’ll even remember to write something – once a week – maybe twice a week.

And then, there is this sense of failure.  I hate thinking I have failed at something.  That is scary.  We are raised to be successful.  I mean, your parents (well, at least mine) didn’t make a habit of telling you that they are so proud of you for being such a failure at ….you fill in the blanks.  So, if I don’t make a deadline, can’t think of something to write, I have failed.  Scary.  Sad.

Finally, there are those 500 words.  What if I don’t have 500 words?  What if I write more?  Well, God bless daughters – mine just told me I didn’t have to write all 500 words.  Amen, amen!  And, maybe you’ll forgive me if I go over 500 words – once it a while?  Thanks and Peace!

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Oh no, a Crone?

Saturday, September 5th, 2009

When I was growing up a crone was an old hag and sometimes was associated with witches and magic. Magic always fascinated me as I’m sure it did most small children.   Later I encountered “cronies” that seemed to be a bunch of old men hanging around together for the seemingly illicit act of drinking and swearing and playing cards together.  Mom would say about Dad, “Oh, he’s down at the fire hall messing around with his cronies.”  And so I never thought much about me being a crone because, well quite frankly, I didn’t fit into either of those categories.

And then, as the boomers got older and the boomer’s mothers got older we needed a moniker that would in some irreverent way honor our ancient bodies and our ancient and supposedly wise  old minds.  And so lately, The Crone, has become simply someone very old and maybe very wise.  Especially a woman.  Men are not crones.  I can think of a lot of other names for old men, but crones just isn’t one of them.  We can get into that in a later blog if we are still speaking to one another.

So. here we are stuck with the label of “The Crone” after you are fortunate enough to have passed some magic point in your life.  And, I have concluded that it must be the miniute, the very, exact minute after you turn 70-years old.  I think it is an honorable age where any woman can hold up her head high and come to the realization that she has lived longer than most people and will probably live even longer yet than most people.  Here is the Crone who has finally fingured out that she has enough experience under her belt to write story after story about the vagaries we call life.  The good times, the bad times, the sermon times, and the wondering times, the funny times, and the really comical times, and at the end of a particularly long day, perhaps even a bit of really deep wisdom will surface. If we wait long enough.

Being the Crone sounds absolutely fabulous, freeing, a freshness of expression that may have been held in bay all this time because mommy would’n like it, or the children might be upset, or one’s brother or father would threaten to take you out of the will, and you know what - the old crone, “don’t give a tinker’s damn” as my mother would say.  Maybe more modern follks might have a different way of expressing it, but it is really up to each on of us to hang onto the crescent moon and swing for a bit. 

Being the Crone is the time in your life to let your hair down, put on your favorite outfit, a light puff of your best perfume, and maybe a hat, but then maybe not.  Go out and throughly enjoy all that God has in mind for you to truly love and experience.  WooHoo – what a feeling – free as a bird, soaring, gliding, able to sing my own song!  Hope you come along for the ride.

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500 Words

Saturday, September 5th, 2009

When I was writing a newspaper column about condominium living I was told that it should be no more than a thousand words.  Not having written much for publication at that time I thought a thousand words would take me forever, that is if I could even write that many words.  Or perhaps, I thought what if I simply had to write two thousand or three thousand words to say what I wanted to say?  It was a good discipline for me to have to focus my thoughts and condense them into 1,000 words so that they were readable and yet made sense.

As I made my way through seminary and two, then four, then ten, then twenty page papers for this professor or that professor, the concept of a thousand words was lost.  No more to focus in, hone your thoughts, and be clear and succinct.  Papers for professors required so many more words, with the exception of one – my homiletics professor.  Ten minutes was the ideal time for a sermon.  I quickly learned that one hundred words equaled about a minute of preaching.  Aha!  My thousand word discipline was paying off in fashioning an almost perfect ten minute sermon.  Mind you, the sermon may not have been perfect, but the timing was impeccable.

And then, along came blogs and emails and Facebook and, OMG, Twitter.  Blogs could go on and on, but I found myself attracted to those that were short and sweet.  Emails were best at about a hundred words.  Facebook, maybe fifty.  The real challenge though was Twitter with its 140 characters.  Not words, characters, as in A, B, C, 1, 2, 3….spaces, commas, even periods counted.  Although Twitter is fast becoming only “headlines,” it is disciplining people to write in a short, concise, and focused manner.

Out of curiosity I decided to cut and paste my favorite blogs into MSWord – meaning, those that actually held my interest and said something meaningful – and see how many words they contained.  Almost without exception they were in the vicinity of five hundred (500) words or less.  The most recent one was from The Geranium Farm and in 428 words Barbara Crafton captured the essence of rain.

For over a year now I have been mulling around the idea of creating my own blog.  But what to write about, what subject, how long, what shall I name it?  I am a priest; should I write about God or godliness?  I am a woman; should I write about feminism?  I am a crone (I crossed the 70-year old mark this year); should I write about the elderly or aged?  Actually, I like being a crone – it liberates me. I am an opinionated individual, and I realized I can write about many things.  But, only if they are five hundred words – more or less.  And, so, here I am with my first blog and I am calling it “Words from The Crone.”  Hope you enjoy it!

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