Coasting

There’s a place in Eastern Oregon where the road leaves the high desert and begins a long, gradual descent through a wide valley, then begins a somewhat steeper ascent into the foothills of the Cascade mountains. The whole of this stretch of road, from the descent on the East to the ascent on the West, is perhaps 5 or 6 miles long and straight as an arrow.

Once, returning from visiting relatives in Eastern Oregon, I stopped the car just where the road begins its descent, put the transmission in neutral, and let the car begin coasting. If I remember correctly, the car was moving at roughly 40 mph when I reached the valley floor. I was still coasting when I reached the foothills of the mountains. Once the car began climbing, though, it wasn’t very long before it slowed to a stop, then began coasting backward.

Just a few years ago, God brought the image of that road to my mind as a way, I believe, of showing me what my life had become. I had been coasting spiritually for many years. For a time I may even have had the appearance of making progress, but when life became an uphill climb, not only did I stop moving forward, I began to fall backwards.

There were many reasons – none of them good – for choosing to coast. Now, of course, I deeply regret it. It was wasted time. There were people who needed help I wasn’t prepared to give. There were things God might have done through me, but I wasn’t ready. It pains me to realize I wasn’t the example of a spiritual father that my kids needed to see. Worst of all from my current vantage point, though, is that I now deeply need the foundation of relationship with God that I should have been building all that time. Not that God doesn’t shower his grace and love on me (read all the other posts here to see otherwise) but like everything else in life, the strength and character that marks the kind of man I wish I were only happens after years of walking with God; there just isn’t any other way.

And from experience – both automotive and spiritual – I can tell you that trying to restart any forward momentum while coasting backwards down a hill is not an easy task.

Don't coast. Nothing in this life can make up for lost time with God.

Spring time in Oregon

Since I'm having a hard time keeping up with posting, I thought I'd cop out and post some photos instead.

Springtime in the Willamette Valley means Daffodils, and Mir & Yvonne went nuts when given permission to pick all they wanted for free.





Hannah turns 19, and Miriam 25, chafing a bit at the affront to her dignity :)

(ugh) Politics

One of the promises I made to myself when I started writing this blog is that I would never mention politics. For one thing, it is so pointlessly divisive. For another, it turns my stomach.

Politics has always been a rough and tumble game, but in the last 10 years it has taken on a much uglier persona, one marked on all sides by venomous hatred of the opposition, where name-calling and character assassination passes for discourse.

I thought I had reached bottom in my cynicism, but the news this week about the bitter bidding war between the two leading democratic candidates for the endorsement of a prominent black pastor brought me to a new low. How can anyone believe in the integrity of the political process - or the church - when endorsements go to the highest bidder?

But I felt like I should at least make an attempt to remind myself and my children (and anyone else who cares to listen) of a few truths:

• “With whatever measure you judge, you shall be judged”. A recent letter to the editor in our local paper opened with , “…most Republicans and/or right-wingers I encounter are too intransigent and egotistical and seldom, if ever, willing to acknowledge errors, much less apologize for them”. What struck me was that I had just read almost the exact statement online – virtually verbatim, describing Democrats and liberals. I wish people could remember that intransigence, ego, arrogance, hypocrisy and stubbornness are hardly the exclusive domain of any political party; they are all very much ingrained in human nature.

• Demonizing the opposition is a cheap copout. I know both conservatives and liberals who are involved in political and social causes, who work very hard to educate themselves about current events, who care passionately for the downtrodden and weak, who make every effort to ensure that government does the right things for all concerned, and yet have reached completely opposite political conclusions from one another.

• The political pendulum always swings back. Always. The party that rides into Washington on its moral high horse to rout out the lying, egotistical hypocrites always find that, four or eight years later, they themselves have become the evil, lying hypocrites who are being ridden out of town.

Our desperation for government to fix all our problems becomes more shrill every year, yet our country continues collapsing in on itself. Will we never learn that government cannot fix our problems? Our social sicknesses are caused by our twisted and broken human nature. Our only hope is a new nature, and for that, Jesus is the only answer.

Lord of the storm

December & January were horrible months. What was handed to me as a 40 hour project in early December became, after analysis & research, a major undertaking requiring approximately 300 hours work, but the deadline stayed the same. Ambiguous, incorrect and unstated project requirements, an unhappy Customer, an unsupportive project manager, and the added frustration of technical problems, all combined to thoroughly wipe out my Christmas spirit. I had more migraines in December than I’d had the previous 11 months combined, and often went 3 or more days on less than 4 hours sleep because of anxiety attacks. I was angry and resentful (after all, what sadist schedules a major business software implementation for Jan 2, adding to what is already the most stressful time of year?!!) and more than a little rebellious (No, I cannot work on the weekend!!). It was not pretty.

I’ve been praying a lot: prayer for strength, sleep, creativity, solutions, endurance, and of course praying for deliverance from the pressure. And God has answered those prayers in various ways (I was delighted and grateful to learn a few years ago that God understands computer technology). Yet in the agony of it all, I kept feeling that God was trying to tell me something, to show me something of Himself that I wasn’t seeing. And I think I finally got it…

One morning last week, as I was praying and thinking about the storm of stress swirling around me like a hurricane, I had a mental image of a man in the middle of a chaotic swirl of angry and frustrated faces and voices, standing calm, unperturbed, and totally free from anxiety and stress. And I thought Yes, that’s it, that’s how I want to be. Then I looked up at my bulletin board, saw the woodcut image of Jesus saving Peter from drowning, and realized that I’d had the answer in front of me all the time: The man I saw in my mind’s eye is a man who understands that Jesus is Lord even over the wind and the waves; and because he understands and trusts Jesus’ lordship, he is calm and confident in his assurance that God is greater than any of the storms that threaten to overwhelm us.

There were many storms in my life last year, and even though I’d looked to God for help in each one, I hadn’t come to the point of truly comprehending and believing that God is Lord over the storms; nor had I accepted that he is entirely trustworthy to keep me safe, or - even better - that he actually desires to meet me in the storms and walk through them with me. The calm assurance that I want only comes when I trust Him completely; and that unshakable trust only comes as I consistently walk with Him through the storms and experience his grace and love – and yes, his deliverance. It's an assurance - not that I won't experience any more storms, but that the storms won't have any more power over me.

"When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and through the rivers, they will not overflow you. When you walk through the fire, you will not be scorched, nor will the flame burn you. For I am the Lord your God."

“Take courage, it is I. Don’t be afraid. … How little you trust me. Why did you doubt?”

My Gift

Barely 4 months ago, Yvonne was to the point of not being able get in and out of bed by herself, had trouble dressing herself, couldn’t raise her hands above her shoulders, couldn’t lift anything of any weight. The cancer in her bones hurt nearly constantly; sneezing or coughing caused excruciating pain. She was deteriorating so rapidly that I knew she would be gone by the end of the year.

Today is our 29^th anniversary, the one I was sure we’d never have. Yvonne has her strength back. Her mobility is back to normal. And though considerable cancer remains, the pain is gone. Completely. And her energy level… as my friend Marc Miller says, “Holy Schnickes!”; she has far more energy than I do.

She is my Christmas gift. This anniversary is my gift. What more could I possibly ask for?

Happy Anniversity!

Every 17^th of December Yvonne and I look at each other and say “What in the world were we thinking, getting married in the middle of the Christmas season?” At the time, Christmas seemed like a wonderfully magical time to get married; each year afterward, however, Christmas has been a lousy time to try to celebrate an anniversary.

Last year we went to a very nice restaurant, and over the course of the evening’s chit-chat with the waitress it came out that we were celebrating our anniversary. At the end of the dinner she brought the check, and at the top had written “Happy Anniversary” – or so I thought at first glance, but when I looked again I realized she had misspelled anniversary and wished us a “Happy Anniversity”, with a big smiley face.

Even while we laughed about it we acknowledged that, in truth, there was a lot of adversity mixed in with the anniversary. Marriage and child rearing are not for the timid or faint of heart, and there’s a lot of wear and tear involved in making a relationship work long term. There were a few years when marriage was a hard slog, and a couple when we wondered whether it was worth the effort.

But 29 years later I can still say, as I’ve said before, that while I’ve never understood what lapse of judgement caused her to fall in love with me (see photo, above), it was the best thing that ever happened to me and I’ve been grateful for it ever since.

Happy Anniversity, indeed :)

Family story time...

Emotionally speaking, she was already pretty close to the edge even before she had been told to clean her room. She had been made to turn off the tv, take a bath, and now, contrary to every 5-year-old instinct, we had inflicted upon her the trauma of putting her toys away before going to bed.

It’s a brutal process, cleaning one’s room. The first step is to sit for several minutes in the middle of what looks like a news clip of a natural disaster, wallowing in the overwhelming enormity of the task.

Next, it’s time to complain loudly that there is too much to put away and if she doesn’t get help she won’t be done before her senior prom. This is usually followed by the parent’s terse rebuttal that it wasn’t too much to get out so it isn’t too much to put away. This, of course, is the catalyst to complete emotional collapse on the part of the 5-year-old. Sometimes the parent, too.

It was along somewhere in this part of the process that she spotted the spider. I knew something was up because suddenly there was an edge of hysteria to her crying. When I entered her room she was backed into a corner, staring at the opposite side of the room.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“Aaaaaaaaaaa sp- sp- sp- aaaahhhhhhhh.”
“What?”
“Sp- sp- sp aaaahhhh!”
“Honey! Calm down. I can’t understand you.”
“Sp- Spiiiiiderrrr!”
“Where? Over here?” I had crossed to the general area she was screaming at and sure enough, under the wall heater was what had once been a fairly large spider, but had obviously long since met its maker.

“I’ll get rid of it, but it’s okay, it’s dead.” I tried to ease her fears.
“But it mooo - oo - ooved,” she sobbed.
“That’s because it jiggled on the web,” I pointed out.
“But how come it moo - oo - ved?”

I could see she was not going to be pacified, so I removed the offending carcass and vacuumed the webs. But we had lost all momentum toward room cleaning and I could tell that we would never get it moving again. Sensing that - for now at least - mercy was greater than judgment, I sent her to get a drink of water and cleaned her room for her.