Silver

                                                           Refined Silver

...I will refine them like silver and test them like gold. They will call on my name and I will answer them; I will say, "They are my people," and they will say, "The Lord is our God."

~ The Bible ~

Sometimes it's not about getting rid of our pain. It's not always about medicating or comforting or squelching grief. If we want to grow ~ to change, to enlarge our understanding of our world and our neighbors ~ we will need to, sometimes, surrender to the process of sorrow.

Like silver being perfected in most intense heat, our souls, minds, and emotions undergo transformative, purposeful purifying if we will let the searing struggle of our everyday do its work.

I wonder: What will come if we set aside our comfort food, our cigarette, our drink, our tv show, our isolation ~ if we set aside our pacifiers and fall into the torturous heat of this day's grief.

What does your life, purified, refined, perfected look like? Who are you on the Otherside of surrendering to your right-now heartache and imperfection? Who are you becoming?

I Asked 20 Gals a Question

I asked twenty women, “What makes you smile with contentment?”
They replied,


 When I see two old people in their 80's, married 60 plus years and can see they totally love each other.


 A hot, clear, sunny day -- especially at the beach


 A crumb-less kitchen floor, or counter, or table


 Bills paid


 Fresh sheets


 Soft toilet paper


 Reading


 Good conversation


 Psalm 119


 Solitude


 Family home together and safe


 Answers (and eating) after a day of prayer and fasting


 Smarties...I don't mind if they do melt in my hand, I can lick it off.


 Brunch with a friend


 Sitting on my mom-in-law's deck having my morning cuppa


 Meals I don't have to prepare or clean up


 Children playing together...nicely


 Anything that turns out well


 The end of a great work day


 A good meal made for company


 A song that I've written and enjoy singing over and over


 Sometimes it involves people...but other times it's a solitary thing


 Reading a book before bed


 Listening to CBC radio chatter


 Discovering a new place to walk or drinking peppermint tea


 Hershey's Bliss Dark Chocolate melting in your mouth


 A dish of President’s Choice Chocolate Fudge Crackle Ice Cream


 Relaxing on the deck with my morning coffee and a good book


 Surveying a room after I have spent the day house cleaning and seeing everything clean and in its place


 Crawling into bed with clean linens


 Cuddling under a quilt with a cool breeze blowing in the window


 Knowing my family is all safely at home during a storm


 The feeling I get after my grandson’s spontaneous hug of greeting


 When I'm out walking in the woods, especially near the river (with my dog 'cause seeing her enjoyment of the walk definitely adds to mine), and my brain quiets down enough for me to just enjoy the beauty around me ~ then it feels like life is good and everything's okay, I can breathe; and God is near.


 When my kids are really actually loving each other, or someone who needs it


 When the house is quiet (and clean!) and I don't feel lonely, just relaxed


 A really good hair and face day


 Watching my children do something kind or caring, or that they excel at or love -- then I know I'm doing something right as a parent; seeing them become the person God made them to be


 Good sex


 Watching the two people I love most – my daughter sleeping peacefully on her daddy’s chest, with her ear laying right over his heart


 Everyone sleeping peacefully


 Cheese is right up there


 Watching my children play and laugh -- Seeing my husband being attacked by our children


 Watching a glorious sunrise


 Visiting with good friends


 Knowing God is in control over everything


 Knowing I am deeply loved just as I am


 Long, leisurely walks with a dear friend


 Looking up at the stars at night


 Quiet moments with God


 Good questions with insightful answers

Sweeping The Lawn and Other Excercises in Domestic Futility

I woke up to three three dead plants, a soggy loo, and a generally disasstisfied family. I couldn't see our kitchen counters: they're covered in school supplies and last night's supper muck.

By ten o'clock (still morning) I had a rolicking headache and had threatened a complaining child (the one who, just last night, spent a solid ten minutes making a case for why he is no longer a "child") within an inch of his schooling life. The words "boarding school" careened around inside my head but, thankfully, never escaped my lips. By eleven o'clock he was out in the backyard working off his attitude in a most tedious and ungratifying manner.

I cannot find the replacement part that I need to repair the (borrowed!!) power washer that I broke.

Moments ago I discovered that the dogs, in silent protest over the recent grooming they received (hairless dogs are a beautiful thing), have been digging ENORMOUS holes in the backyard tree and flower beds. Too lazy to trek all the way to the shed for a rake, I just grabbed a nearby broom and did an expletive-laden sweep of dirt back into offending hole.

I find myself unable to tap my creative resources to come up with yet another Phys. Ed. 20 "long-term objective." Even though my high school lad "kind of need(s) it right now." It's tough to be ingenious when the tap AND the fridge are leaking, the floor's sticking, the laundry's piling, the dog doots are smelling, and there are males everywhere.

But at 12:20 (insert soundtrack of otherwordly music here and find yourself bathed in a holy glow), with a mess of peanut butter, tuna, and old soup making it's slow march across every surface that is not covered by a book or a drawing or a school list, I cracked open my first ever box of the Mr. Clean "Magic Eraser."

Oh yes. I did.

I was skeptical. So skeptical. And I was cranky. Very cranky. But a friend had generously dropped some by for me to try, and they were sitting right there (smushed between the marker bin and the tea pot), so I had nothing to lose.

And now? All wrongs have been righted. ALL wrongs. A lawn that needs sweeping? Who cares! I can clean scuff marks off of the baseboards! Scuff marks, I tell you! A half-hearted little scrub of the fridge has the door shining ~ sparkly new! The footprint left on the front door by firefighters (Yes. That was two years ago.)? Gone! I've tried everything to remove that mark...and now, thanks to Mr. Clean, it's gone.

Magic. My sons can attest to the transformation I'm undergoing as we speak, "Look," Jamy said just moments ago, "the little cleany thingy is making Mom squeak." They're mocking me, I know, but I just don't care because, in the days ahead, the smudges and smears and gashes that have been adding to the befuddlement of my haggardly housewifey brain will all be gone. 

And you can bet that the next Mr. Clean claims "magic" as part of their results, I'll buy into it. My deepest hope, in this domestic moment, is that the next product on their list is a wand. A magical, magical wand. One flick of the stick and all will be righted. Clothes, hair, walls, loos, dogs. All. We're counting on you, Mr. Clean.

Where Wasps go to Die

The water in our backyard swimming pool is sickly green. Clumps of wind-blown dog hair and dead leaves slither their way across it's bottom, carried by the sludgy currents rippling down from the bug and algae laden surface.The twelve by three foot rubber and plastic oasis is so nasty looking that even the neighborhood boys won't stick their toes into it.

And I'm standing on the edge of it, using my body weight to depress the side so that the muck can seep it's way out of the tank and into the grass. Dead wasps and flies, fully encased in stringy, feathery algae, slip over the toes of my Crocs. Clusters of now-green dog hair slide eagerly by my ankles, shooting for freedom.

I am confused by the state of things: How did a consistently cared-for luxury become such a labor intensive disaster zone? I drain and scrub and drain some more. I scrub some more. Hours later I begin the process of re-filling the pool and think, "I'll just take a look at the filter to see if it needs a scrub, too." And there it is: The solution to the mystery.

No filter. The canister that holds the filter ~ the one we'd carefully hooked up to the side of the pool, the one we'd been faithfully running for months ~ is empty. No filter. Just dirty water in. Dirty water out. Dirty water in. Dirty water out. Hours of electricty and good intentions spent to no useful end.

As the dead insects and slime swirl around my toes (believe me, if there was a less disgusting way to achieve the same end, I would have found it!) I think about some of the conversations I've been having with friends lately. We've been talking about morality and about how to raise children in a culture that seems to be going mad in it's insistence that everything goes. 

The making of a porn movie has become the stuff of comedy. And people think it's really, really funny. 
Degrading men and masculinity in every conceivable manner is standard comedic practice (Imagine the writers of TV land attempting to denegrate women the way they do Homer or Ray Romano or Jim.). 
Teenage girls pole dance on a teen award show. Young girls watch and can't wait to be "just like her when I grow up!"

We could all add things to the list, right? Moments from our everyday where we've thought, "Whoa. Is that really okay? Did I just see that?"

Last week I observed a group of young guys hanging out at a cluster of picnic tables, their long arms and legs dangling casually all over everything. I was fascinated by their relationships to one another, their characters, everything, until I drew close enough to hear their conversation.

A solitary girl stood at the edge of their group, shifting uncomfortably, one hand twisting the strap of her purse nervously; one hand absentmindedly tugging at the hem of her so-short shorts. One of the boys said, "You remember, don'tcha'? You got so drunk and then you remember what we all did to ya', don'tcha'?" Her reply was too soft for me to hear over the boys' not-so-fascinating laughter. 

It's no great reach to observe that the sludge in our cultural "pool" is building up. While the mucky muck in my backyard made for a pretty cool Science project and a few hours' entertaining swabbing, the sludge of a culture that is stewing in it's own mess without any filters is a lot less amusing.

Some of my friends want out of the pool ~ They just want to go find a nice, new, clean pool to splash around in. Some suggest that the pool isn't dirty at all and that we just need to become more openminded about the floaties and the detritus (Those "some" have never tried to keep their footing when green goo is coating the bottom of the thing!). Some would say that if we just put some filters in place we can clean up the pool we've already got.

Our own pool now has a filter in the filter canister. The bottom has returned to it's original inviting white and blue tiled pattern. The deceased wasps have been siphoned off to that great wasp's nest in the sky and the dog hair was all pulled up by the lawnmower.

Mental note for next summer: A pool without a filter stagnates. It becomes useless and repugnant. Unless you're a bug that's looking for someplace to die. Filtered water is cool, refreshing, alluring, and a lot less work. Unless we decide we can afford a new pool every few months, we'd be wise to remember the filters.

Hungry?

In his book, "Hunger for God," John Piper suggests that the spiritual discipline of fasting allows us to acknowledge our true hunger for the Divine ~ for God. By setting aside the comforting anesthetic of food, by engaging in a degree of physical discomfort (that leads to emotional discomfort), we permit ourselves to address our deepest longing: The longing for restoration with God.



When we deny ourselves food, he says, we are forced to ask, "Do I really hunger for God? Do I miss Him?"



Do I miss Him?



We spend our everday actively working to silence the need, sorrow, anger, and longing for purpose that powerfully threatens to overwhelm us in our materialistic and relationally bankrupt culture. Alcohol, cigarettes, prescription (and non) drugs, work, affairs, and such: Television is my own most effective soother, but food is it's comforting companion. By assuring myself of their mind-numbing, emotion-squelching constancy I can surely navigate a day's dis-ease.



By choosing to set them aside, I might find myself nose-to-nose with the desperate realization that I miss Him. I miss His sanctity and justice. I miss His clarity and hope. I miss His goodness. I miss things about Him that I've never known: the touch of His hand, the look of His eye, the cut of His jaw.



I miss Him. We miss Him, don't we? I wonder at the opportunity to set aside the good things of our lives long enough to be reminded that He is Goodness itself. The bounty that we know here is a shadow, a dim reflection of the substance and Glory of God Himself.

Hail-bitten Fruit

Summer storms are staggering in their beauty. They're powerful and destructive and wild. With winds whipping around at 100 km/hr, flinging crushing hail and biting rains, they are unstoppable. The ferocity of lightening and chilling temperatures combine to flatten, char, freeze, break, topple.

Sometimes our own lives are hit by storms that look a lot like a summer squall (Can you be in a squall if you're not at sea? I should look that up.). Crisis, fear, grief, complicated relationship, the daily grind ~ These things have the same effect on our mental, emotional, and spiritual health as a crazy weather system has on our crops, our cities, our gardens.

The Bible says that you can tell if a person knows God by His traits in their life. Specifically, they'll have love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness, and self-control. God calls those bits of Himself "fruit." He compares Himself to a tree, and compares us to the branches. The evidence that we're connected to Him will be good fruit.

A friend and I had a conversation about those attributes over coffee the other day, acknowledging that we would love to be able to reflect God by carrying those qualities around with us all of the time.

But storms come, right? And when storms hit, fruit takes a pounding.

Our family has been waiting expectantly for Fall when we'd be picking the largest harvest of apples that our trees have ever produced. The branches have been so weighed-down with perfectly forming fruit that we've culled the clusters so that the remaining apples will be larger and even sweeter.

Last weekend a fierce storm whipped through our yard. Every apple on every tree is ruined. Their ripening flesh has been torn apart by icy shards of hail. They're hanging desolately from stunned branches, surrounded by shredded leaves. There was no hope of them surviving that storm. They were unprotected, exposed. Good fruit is vulnerable to all sorts of menace, I guess.

When life is calm and uninterrupted by heartache or difficulty, producing good fruit seems a natural course. In a storm-free season, when God seems kind and gentle, we might find ourselves exhibiting a lot of His goodness, His faithfulness, His self-control (Imagine producing so much good stuff that it had to be thinned-out just to facilitate the eventual beauty of the remaining produce? I wonder how, exactly, God does that culling?).

When we're battered by difficulty and broken dreams and death and sickness, some of that fruit is going to hit the dirt in a hurry. Some of it will keep clinging to the source of it's life, but it will be pock-marked and inedible. Some of it will need to be chucked.

But storms pass and new growing seasons come.

Our apple trees won't give us more good fruit this season. They'll need to rest now; to regroup through the winter and into the spring. If you've been slammed with too much reality, it's okay to rest, to recover. Cut yourself some slack and don't worry too much about the state of the fruit that's dangling off your wounded branches.

Do, purposefully, connect (re-connect) with the source of your own Life. Be sure that you're attached to the Living God Who nourishes, nurtures, enables you to survive this season and grow into the next one. You'll be showing evidence of His Life in you before you know it. Love. Joy. Peace. Patience. Kindness. Goodness. Gentleness. Faithfulness. Self-control. That's what God looks like. And you reflect Him. One bit at a time. Even after a storm.

Michael Jackson

Michael Jackson died this week.

His passing matters in different ways to different people, and in some way to most people. Responses to his tragic leaving are varied, too. Some of us feel shock, others vindication. Some sorrow, some pause, some nothing at all. Some feel angry.

Bill has just passed the eighty-years-old mark in his own life. He continues to live alone, unaided, maintaining his own home and yard. He drives himself to coffee and back. He's in relatively good health, and he's bitter that any one man should have such fanfare surrounding their death.

We're all gonna' die, you know. When it's your time to go, it's your time to go.

His tone is strident, bordering on rage.

I don't know what the big deal is about this guy. Lots and lots of people die and you never hear a thing about them and their g**d**n funerals.

He is an aging gentleman facing his own mortality and wondering why a man who sang a few songs should garner such praise and acclaim while the rest of us just slip away into the next life without more than a whispered acknowledgement.

He has a point. Michael Jackson is famous for his musical and performing genius. He's infamous for allegations of hurting children. His off-stage madness has earned him ~ and pop culture rags ~ notoriety and millions of dollars. Our unbridled curiosity has given the madness steady forward momentum. But on the other side of this life he is as we are: one person fully connecting with the One God. One magnificent, sinful, glorious, base, God-reflecting, wounded life standing toe-to-toe with Holy Love.

He receives the attention of millions at his passing because he impacted millions in his lifetime. You and I will impact many, many others, too ~ some in healing, supportive, and loving ways, others in harmful, unforgivable ways. When we go, the services held in our honor will be tiny compared to Michael's send-off. On this side of life, it will appear that his life was worth more than our own.

Bill feels that way. Maybe you do, too.

On the other side, who knows? I don't know what Bill will encounter there. I know that he dealt cruelly with his wife and daughters. I know that he is demanding in his old age as he was in his youth. I look at my own life, scales of judgment alternately swinging, loosely empty, or groaning beneath their staggering burdens.

Bill's life, mine, yours will not be considered as one more valuable than another. We are equally and passionately adored by our Creator. Did we acknowledge Jesus? Did we love well? Did we care for the poor, the fatherless, the broken? These are some of the qualities that will be measured ~ these, and the motives behind them.

Bill's frustration is understandable. Why should "some famous guy" get more attention than the man who has lived a hidden life well? In our culture, that trend isn't going to end. But Bill will get his all-eyes-on-him moment. It may not come with a golden coffin bedecked in red roses and surrounded by millions of mourners. It will certainly come with the One who made us giving Bill His full attention.

If I had words and opportunity, that would be something to tell Bill. There aren't many audiences that really matter. In fact, there are probably only two: Our God and the ones that He's asked us to love. Everything else is just clamour and fluff. So, while the living's still good, live for those two things. Find examples of secret-living integrity. Mirror that. Let the pomp and flash and noise of the famous entertain you; remember that behind that drama is a person much like you. A man or a woman who will be judged in the public eye, but ultimately measured ~ and cherished ~ in the eyes of God.

Parker

Wearing stained khaki shorts and a wide-striped t-shirt, a stranger sits eating cafeteria sushi from a Styrofoam tray. A black and white keffiyeh is slung casually around his neck.

X-ray technicians scoot purposefully between examination rooms, quietly intoning the names of first one patient, then the next.

A beyond-old gentleman, parchment skin stretched too thin across dying bones, moans gently from his stretcher, "Help me? Somebody help me?" The immediately on-hand nurses reassure him, again and again, that he'll soon be rescued from his stuck-in-the-hallway plight.

Settling into a suspiciously soiled waiting room chair, I search for a magazine to busy my hands; something I can pretend to read while I take in the abbreviated bits of people-stories murmuring around me. My glance meets that of a fifty-something blue collar worker. Work boots agap at the tongues, shirt sleeves rolled past his elbows, he initiates conversation.

Small talk and pleasantries are quickly set aside as I set my gaze on the two slender metal pins protruding from his swollen right hand. In answer to my query, he tells of a tumble from his camper step followed by a pain filled and sleepless night. With a satisfied grin he relays the story of pokes and prods and pinning that he's since endured. I squirm to learn that he's been without painkillers all day. He is good-humored, I think, for a man who has been shuffling from one hospital waiting room to another for the past seven hours.

Our conversation turns to his time in the city and his much missed home in Saskatchewan. We talk about his wife, his dog, his three grown children. "And I'm going to be a Grandpa for the first time. Sometime this month, actually."

He refers to his coming grandchild by name, "Parker's coming soon, but he'll be born with only half a heart. It's going to be tough on the little guy." Parker will be Lacey and Ron's first child and the family's first grand baby. My new acquaintance calmly, gently, calls the wee on-the-way boy by name again as he talks about the research he's done into the baby's condition, the surgeries that will be involved in building the boy a heart that will do what it needs to, and the documented lifespan of a child born with such a condition.

"Twenty-one, twenty-two years. That's it. I don't know. You just wonder if it'd be better if maybe something happened right when he was born, you know?"

I don't know. I don't pretend to know. So I don't suggest that I do. I ask another question or two and then my name is called. "I don't know if I'll see you again," I say, moving toward the nurse that's waiting by the exam room door, "but I'm going to pray for Parker...and for Lacey...and for you. I'll just pray."

He doesn't say anything to that. What can you say to that? His parting smile is genuine and patient and full of goodness.

So here I am, thinking about Parker and Lacey and Grandpa-to-be and wondering if maybe you'd pray, too? Parker's story, his family's story, will never be known to us. But we can ask our Everywhere, Everydetail God to connect to that story.

Happy Almost-Canada-Day

http://www.metronews.ca/calgary/canada/article/253369--canadian-citizenship-like-winning-jackpot-rick-mercer

Put a Pin in it

I'm learning that:

• making a choice to change your dream for the future is really scary, but it brings peace, too.
• raspberry plants can't stand up to digging dogs.
• nobody thirty or older is managing our long winters with any sort of good humor.
• everybody gets the schedule wrong sometimes. Some of us do so more than others.
• prayer is a simple and complex intimacy. Belief, likewise.
• the ice cream truck always comes at bed time.
• relationships are hard. They don't have to be, but they are anyway.
• mercy looks like weakness to an angry world.
• teenagers are laugh-out-loud funny most of the time.
• we need each other like we need oxygen, water, bread...M&M's
• spiders are frighteningly adaptable...and teensy enough to get in anywhere, anytime.
• many well-laid fire pit plans are undone by bossy prairie winds.