For my mom...

I will never be as good a mother as my mother is. It is a well-known, documented, certainty, but you should know I'm OK with it. It is like playing basic gym tennis and getting to go to Wimbledon. When the serve whizzes past you, you don't feel envy. You feel blessed at having had a ticket to be there to see it.

First, you should know that my mom bristles at compliments. This post will horrify her.  When I was 13 and awkward and convinced I was the ugliest creature ever born, in a fit of exasperated frustration, I blurted out to Mom, "You just don't understand! You're..you're PERFECT!"  She was as shocked and angry as if I'd called her a nasty name. "Manda, I am NOT!" she retorted, and we just stared at each other, full of love and being misunderstood,  tongue-tied and knowing all words would somehow take us further away from where we wanted to be.  She is the most beautiful woman I have ever seen, and has no idea.  When you ask her who the most beautiful woman who ever lived is, she will say, her mother. I say, Grandmother is a close second. She, my mother's mother,  was like a light, with her blond hair and her garden and her good posture and her crisp white blouses, playing golf and bridge and watching the Braves on TV.  Her laugh was like a wind chime and she was strong as steel. And her daughter is all the best of who she was, and more. So, you see, how blessed I am, and how I will never be what they are or were, but it is a blessing all the same.

My mother is funny and wise, but not in a way that demands attention. She can play any sport, and play it well,  and she makes the best vegetable soup, ever.  She is beautiful in her dressed up for work clothes (tailored and classic) and in the clothes she bikes in...(baggy shorts, layered t-shirts, men's tube socks, visor, water, snack, gum).  She brings me big glasses of ice water and takes me shopping even though I hate shopping. My mother is quiet, and has the ministry of presence down pat. She can, just by being in a room, make everything better. There is a sense that all is right with the world with her in it.  She has a way of being in a room and not taking up any space, and yet, changing the whole feeling of the whole space into something that is happy and good.  She gave me space and peace to grow up in and a love of words and learning, a lovely and warm and good broth to simmer in, as I figured out who I was and who I would be. She's the oldest girl of 5 children, so I figure she was a mother-type early on, and has had lots of practice.

My mother is smart as a whip and good to the bone. She has 3 Master's degrees. She teaches little children to love reading, and she loves the kids so much more than "administration" and rules. She lets them check out books anytime they want to, not just on library day, and lets them check out books regardless of whether they can read them or not. She believes every child can learn and that love is something every child needs. I think she believes in her heart that if every child could just have the right kind of love, in the right amounts, that most of the world's problems would be solved. She is a great judge of character and is no respecter of those outside indicators that we are so proud of: pedigree, station or money.  She respects good people, or people in need, or people trying to do their best. People routinely underestimate her, and because she is never in it for any kind of recognition, she lets them.

My mother loves literature and a great poem and she "gets it," all the deepest truths that I love to find in great ideas. She is all about the transcendent and understands about a great sermon or a fine novel or a perfect turn of phrase.  I recall listening with her to Eudora Welty read "Why I Live at the P.O." on reel to reel tape and laughing until we cried. She brought it home like a treasure and we set it up in the dining room.  The smell of furniture polish still makes me think of it, "Then I pulled the electric oscillating fan out of the wall by the  cord and everything got REAL hot." Great day, that was the funniest thing I have ever heard. And to hear my mama laugh with it made it best of all. When someone says something that would be perfect in print, we say, "Put it in the book," and laugh. Another proud moment was when she finally heard me preach in person, just this past July. She teared up a little and said, "You have a gift." I thought, well, my first gift was being your daughter, actually...if you want to get technical about it.

Mother would say that it hurts a person deep down inside if they don't have a reliable and loving mother of their own. She would say kids can make it without many other things if they have enough love. She would say it is our responsibility to share the love we have received to help people who didn't get it growing up.  She would say it is a ministry. I would say, she's absolutely right.  And, no of course she's not a perfect mother, but she is about as close to perfect at loving somebody as anybody I know, and she's certainly the perfect mother for me.

God's Valentine

When our son was in kindergarten, his class studied Martin Luther King, Jr. for January. He marched out of school talking about him a mile a minute, so I said,”He was a good man who stood for justice and peace.”   And my son looked at me with his serious face on and said, “Mommy, justice is a ‘God-word,’ just like love.”  It's a humbling moment when your five-year-old is smarter than you are.

Valentine's Day always makes me think about love.  I know Valentine’s Day is supposed to be based on a saint and everything, but it strikes me in practice as a “Hallmark holiday” somebody stuck a robe on and started calling “Reverend.” When I see all that red cellophane and all those stuffed bears clogging up the CVS aisle, it actually makes me a little sad.  Will a little sucrose heart-shaped vitamin with “Be Mine” stamped on it really be the cure for what ails us in the love department?  Can a Whitman’s sampler really get us through a long dark night of the soul? (“Yes, yes it can!” I hear the chocoholics shout).

Maybe our task as pastors and preachers is to point folks away from the temporary sugar high of the Valentine’s Day culture to a God who wants to say to every yearning heart, “Be Mine.”  Maybe we can use this Hallmark holiday to acknowledge the valentines from God that have been tucked into the corners of our lives: all those good gifts of God that go  unnoticed over time. God’s valentines often come in human packages, in our families and friends, in our pastors and teachers, in our congregations and even in our enemies. Maybe we can explore more deeply the kind of love with which God so loved the world and what that kind of love means for us  and our life together.  This deep love sits with those who suffer and reaches out to people who are lost, lonely, and in despair and refuses to abandon them even when they prove difficult to love.    

By all means, we should express our love and appreciation to people in our lives this Valentine’s Day.  We don’t do that nearly enough.  But we also need to remember that love is washing feet and sitting with and praying through.  Love is not cute or heart-shaped.  Love is a God made flesh that was killed on a cross and was raised from the dead.  It is a Lenten journey and an Easter proclamation.  It is serious life-claiming, life-changing, business.  Love is, first and foremost, a “God-word.”

My appendix, Charles Wesley, and even a bit of Dickens

 I have just gotten home from a brief unplanned stay in the hospital. I brought everything home with me that I took in, save a little bit of tissue heretofore known as "my appendix." Even the name of the body part sounds temporary, an afterthought of our maker, a sort of dangling postscript. It's as if God said, "Well, I've put in a colon, not a period or question mark, so it feels incomplete down there. I know!  I'll put....an appendix." Not really the main plot, but a sort of divine rhetorical flourish, like the swirls on the  S's in the Declaration of Independence.

This little appendix is (or in my case was) the least impressive resident of a dark and mysterious place called the abdominal cavity. It's an appropriate name for a place loaded with amorphous blobs of vitally important tissue, all doing their work in the engine room of our body, so that our brain can think great inspired thoughts, from a love poem or a great novel, to "Where in the world are Nathan's shoes NOW?"  It is all a dark mystery, this place where the utterly mundane and miraculous live, where breakfast is processed and babies are made.  It's no wonder Dickens had Ebeneezer Scrooge dismiss the appearance of Marley's ghost, saying "You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of underdone potato. There's more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!" 

A couple hundred years ago, people even talked about love as a thing that resided in your "gut".  We see it in one of my favorite hymns by the wondrous Charles Wesley "Come O Thou Traveler Unknown." It's based on Jacob wrestling with an unknown opponent, asking what his/her/its name is, and Wesley writes it in the first person, because we all wrestle with and try to get our arms around who and what God is. At the end, for Jacob, it is an angel that gives him a blessing, a new name, and a limp. For Wesley and for us, it is God revealed in Christ, "whose nature and whose name" turns out to be love!

’Tis Love! ’tis Love! Thou diedst for me!
I hear Thy whisper in my heart;
The morning breaks, the shadows flee,
Pure, universal love Thou art;
To me, to all, Thy bowels move; (!!!!!)
Thy nature and Thy Name is Love.

So, as I sit here, somewhat gingerly, I am led to contemplate my good Maker, whose nature and whose name is love.  I'm grateful for the blessing of health, for the joys of being named "child of God," and even for my little limp, a reminder of the precious gift of being "fearfully and wonderfully made" (Ps. 139:14), and the equally God-given gift of medical science and care.

And as my own little "appendix," if you have stomach pain that starts in the middle and becomes localized to the right side, don't overly google it. "Trust your gut," that place where so much resides, and get thee to an ER.  You will be glad you did, no matter what it turns out to be.