Monthly Archives: March 2011

The Black Club on Vacation

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The Black Club recently convened in Florida. Jack and his cousin-dog, Sydney, have enjoyed a week of daily fun together on Sanibel Island, working hard to keep cool in their black fur. The first day, when both dogs were panting hard, Skylar suggested they might feel cooler if they took off their fur coats. When I asked her how to do that, she demonstrated the movements of removing her own invisible coat, first the zipper, then each arm. I said, “Ok, let’s take the dogs’ coats off,” she looked diligently for their zippers but never did find them.

The Black club members couldn’t believe how salty the ocean tasted compared to Lake Michigan but kept sampling it, shaking their heads in disgust after each gulp. Regardless, their happy dances continued uninterrupted, and both of them were pleased to be included on the family trip.

Dogs are well-liked on Sanibel with quite a few of them out on leashes strolling the beaches every morning and evening. Jack and Sydney wagged their way up to enthusiastic strangers but lived for off-leash romps in the Florida greenbelt (a tropical substitute for sand dunes) when other dogs weren’t around. Both Jack and Sydney adapted to vacation life quickly, and as long as we were nearby, they were completely content.

I wish it was that easy for the rest of us to find contentment. God offers to provide it for us if we’ll take him up on it, but most of us quest after it through our own methods, ignoring the Lord’s ideas. One perfect example is a family vacation. Looking forward to it usually includes an expectation of contentment that’s very rarely realized. Instead we work hard (while on vacation) to adjust (to our vacation), and struggle to resume the routine (after our vacation) when we get home.

It’s curious that the words contentment and contention resemble each other closely but have opposite meanings. The first is to be emotionally satisfied, the second to struggle in opposition. Much of our effort to find contentment is really contention with God’s scriptural principles.

What are his ideas on how to experience contentment? Here are just a few, taken from biblical passages:

  • Appreciate what’s in our closets.
  • Express gratitude for our homes.
  • Tell our complaints to God not others.
  • Take care not to love money.
  • View crises as tests we want to pass.
  • Share what we have.

Each of those may, at first, seem to oppose contentment, but they work. The age-old theory “more is always better” is a fantasy, a trick of the devil leading to permanent discontent instead.

But if this list is too hard to pursue all at once, we can always do what Jack and Sydney did to be content: dig a hole and crawl in.

“Godliness actually is a means of great gain when accompanied by contentment. For we have brought nothing into the world, so we cannot take anything out of it either.” (1 Timothy 6:6-7)

Force of Habit

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Even on vacation, needs arise for routine errands to the grocery store, the airport or a gift shop. Today I was at the Sanibel post office to finish a few mailing tasks. When I walked back into the parking lot, without even thinking I went right up to a white Chrysler mini-van identical to the one I used to own. My clicker wouldn’t open the locks, of course, which let me know of my mistake. My red Highlander was the next car over but had failed to break the hold of “what used to be.”

All of us are creatures of habit. We find comfort in routine and like regularity in our schedules. Even children have a rut-like mentality that causes them to love a rut. For example, it’s taken all week for Skylar and Micah, ages 2 and 1, to adjust to their vacation home-away-from-home and to sleep past 5-something in the morning.

I’ve had trouble adjusting to Nate’s absence this week, because our Sanibel “habit” began with him in 1980 and continued many years after that. It was our routine, our tradition, the way it was meant to be. Being here without him includes a measure of emptiness and makes me wonder if we should even come back next year. Yesterday Linnea and I both got teary talking about it.

In the past year I’ve spoken with quite a few widows. No two stories are alike, but the one constant is a radical break in “the way we were.” To be married several decades is to come into a period of the relationship characterized by the word “comfortable.” The two of you have become one entity, and you both like it that way.

When death disturbs the routine, happy habits are forcefully broken. After a husband (or wife) dies, every life pattern changes, and adjustments never end. It’s like being in an airplane that’s been flying a straight course, when suddenly it begins doing loops, dives and spirals. It’s hard to get our bearings.

Death wasn’t God’s plan, and he never intended we’d have to adjust to it. Apparently he meant for Adam and Eve to continue forever in the perfection of Eden. But sinful choices deep-sixed that arrangement, bringing spiritual death immediately and physical death later on. The Eden routine surely must have been a hard habit to surrender.

After sin, the break from “the way they were” changed everything for Adam and Eve including their home, their neighborhood, their work and their walk with God. Separation. Division. Disconnection. The adjustments must have taken quite some time.

Old habits die hard. It was true back then and is true today. But Adam and Eve finally did adjust, and God stuck with them in their new life. That’s true for us today, too. As long as we live, change will yank us from our comfortable ruts and insist we adjust.

We see these disruptions as painful endings, but God views them as fresh beginnings. And he will help us.

“The Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in My name, He will teach you all things.” (John 14:26)

Small Beginnings

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If we oldsters in the autumn of our years could bottle some of the youthful energy surrounding us here in Florida, we’d all have the pep of 18-year-olds after draining the bottle. When our seven enthusiastic young children are at the pool together, other resort guests pick up and leave.

The oldest two, Mary’s twin granddaughters, are the leaders of the pack at nine years old. Witnessing their limitless energy in the water, you’d never know they survived a very rocky start in life.

Hannah and Erika were born almost nine weeks premature weighing 3.12 and 3.5 pounds respectively. When I visited them at the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) the week they were born, I wondered if they would make it at all. Their tiny bodies bristled with tubes and wires, hooked up to the best that medical machinery could offer.

When Hannah contracted meningitis and Erika evidenced heart trouble, anxiety ran high. But day-on-day, they gained weight and strength, leaving the hospital a month later.

Their young mommy, my niece Julia, did a stellar job nursing them, no small feat for two tiny babies who needed frequent feedings. She was grateful for each day’s progress and never complained about her daunting task. Today she’s every bit as thankful for their presence in her family as she was the day they were born.

Julia and her husband Drew had a jump on the rest of us in terms of viewing their children as God’s creative handiwork. Our babies came at full term without crises, and we took that blessing for granted. But the twins (and their younger brother Andrew) are so appreciated, their parents take advantage of every opportunity to turn their attention toward the God who made them.

Hannah and Erika were taken on their first mission trip at six years old. Including them on a journey to Ecuador was a risk, but the girls’ world view is shaping up to be full of tenderness toward the poor, partly because of that trip. In preparation for serving with their parents and other families, the girls were told of children who lived with their parents in a dump, scavenging food others had discarded.

After returning home, the twins prayed for the people they’d met. One evening after Julia had dished up dinner, Erika took her untouched plate of food to the trash and began scraping her food into the garbage. “What are you doing?” Julia said.

“I’m sending my food to the children who live at the dump,” Erika said. Although the Ecuadorian families would never receive that offering of love, God did and was extremely pleased with her sacrifice.

Linking that incident with the twins’ early days in the NICU, none of us can doubt God had eternal work for these two fragile preemies to accomplish. And they’ve already begun.

God actually has important work for every life to accomplish, and that includes even those born too prematurely to “make it” on this earth.

It also includes all who’ve had their lives snuffed out before they even have a chance to be born.

“We are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.” (Ephesians 2:10)