Monthly Archives: July 2012

Have we seen that before?

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When Nate died, we had 2 grandchildren, 15 month old Skylar and 10 month old Nicholas. Since then, 4 more little lives have joined our family: Micah, Evelyn, Thomas, and Autumn. Birgitta’s October baby will be a 5th, bringing the total grands to 7.

The oldest of this passel of children is only 3, but a-lotta lively livin’ has been packed into the 2½ years since Nate left us. Because I believe every new life originates with God, I enjoy the thought that somehow our Lord, acting in love, has given Nate knowledge of these 4 little ones.

As I look at their angelic faces, once in a while I get glimpses of my husband. It’s the wonder of ancestry that facial features from a grandpa could reappear in his grandchildren or even in generations not yet born. We see this in something as simple as hair color. Nate and I were surprised when our first child came out with red hair, so we looked for other “carrot-tops” in our family tree. To our surprise they were dotted on both sides, though none in a close generation.

Every physical feature comes from someone else along the genealogy before us, though we may not recognize who or when. Grandpa’s eyes, great-grandma’s smile, auntie’s cheekbones. Yet in God’s unlimited ability to make each individual unlike any other, when he puts the recurring pieces together, each person turns out to be unique.

Far more important than someone’s physical characteristics, however, is the heart, and I don’t mean the lubb-dubb kind. Although most physical hearts look alike, it’s our emotional hearts that God is keenly interested in, and each of those is one-of-a-kind. He’s especially curious about whether or not our hearts beat for him.

If we daily seek after him with a desire to do life his way, the delightful result is that we’ll gradually become more like him. Some of his characteristics will appear in us, similar to the way the physical characteristics of our ancestors pop up one generation to the next.

Folklore tells us there’s one other way to look like someone else: stay married for a long time and you’ll begin to resemble your spouse. Maybe it’s a result of mirroring each other day after day or looking across the table and picking up each other’s mannerisms. Maybe it’s the result of eating the same diet or breathing the same air.

Whatever the reason, in our efforts to become more like Christ, it’s a pretty good idea to “look across the table” each day and see the Lord. If we watch what he does, obey his instructions, and eat a steady diet of his Word, we’re bound to start looking like him.

“We know that when Christ appears, we shall be like him.” (1 John 3:2)

Yikes!

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Over the weekend I was shopping for groceries when a pesky bug began harassing me. While I was doing my best to wave it away, two young boys started whispering to each other and staring at me.

Suddenly the older one said, “Scuse me, ma’m. Scuse me! You have a giant spider in your hair!”

As I began batting at my head, the boys moved closer to their mother. Then the younger one yelled, “Now it’s on your face!”

Apparently the spider had been playing on my neck, head, and face for quite a few store aisles. I slapped at myself like a woman possessed, bending over, shaking my head and squealing, “Yikes!”

Finally the culprit fell to the floor, a giant daddy long legs. Though its body was only the size of a plump pea, his 8 long legs made him seem much bigger. The older boy ran toward me, and with two whacks of his shoe, the spider was dead.

“Wow! Thanks for defending me!” I said. He looked up as if expecting to see other spiders in my hair, and I appreciated the risk he’d taken in coming so close to creepy me. Then I looked down the aisle where something interesting was happening. The boys’ mother was busy ruffling her own hair, bending toward the floor as I had, apparently getting rid of her own spider.

“You too?” I said.

“I don’t know!” she said. “There better not be! I don’t want any of that!” She continued swatting her forehead, flicking the hair around her ears, shaking her head.

After thanking them, I pushed my cart to the next aisle and thought about one of life’s big mysteries: the power of suggestion. All of us are influenced by it every day. The woman saw the spider in my hair and abruptly thought she had one in hers, too.

When I was a school kid, a friend and I got a kick out of standing on a street corner looking up. Passers-by would stop next to us and look up too, a demonstration of how quickly the power of suggestion can influence us.

This same power is what’s behind every print ad, TV commercial, and computer pop-up. If advertisers suggest a certain product can solve my problem, or if it seems I’m the only one who doesn’t have this-or-that, I’ll probably bite.

The power of suggestion is also what’s behind every temptation that comes to us from the devil. He’s a pro at using suggestive powers to custom-make temptations for different people, hoping we won’t use our God-given power to fight back.

We’ve learned to resist the ploys of the advertising world, and we don’t buy everything we see. So we can learn to resist the devil, too. All it takes is practice appropriating the resistance-power God offers. The more we resist, though, the easier it gets.

“Humble yourselves before God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you.” (James 4:7)

Maintenance Chores

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This week Louisa, our cosmetologist and hair stylist, kept her scissors snipping by giving haircuts to 6 family members. She’s good at what she does and has an endless string of clients because of it. The littler the customer, the more difficult the task, and she cut two preschoolers this week. Working with sharp blades on a moving target isn’t easy.

All of us spend a great deal of time on life-maintenance, just to stay even, and it’s not only haircuts. If we listed every daily stay-even chore we shouldn’t miss, the list would be arm’s length and would include everything from brushing teeth to changing diapers to walking dogs. Yet these things have to be done. If we fall behind, the consequences pile up much longer than an arm’s length, and we pay a high price for neglecting what would have been manageable on a daily basis.

The opposite is true, too. If we tend to something every day, with time our goals can be met. For example, Nate was a big reader but felt compelled to spend most of his reading time on professional work and 4-5 daily newspapers. But just before bed each night, he’d open what I called “pleasure reading,” books so thick we used to use them as booster chairs for young children. By reading several pages at a time, day in and day out, he completed hundreds of challenging books.

The simple truth of tending to our lives bit by bit, day by day, applies to our spiritual lives, too. If we’ve always wanted to read through the Bible but the project seems too daunting even to begin, we never will. But if we read even one page a day, in time we’ll finish.

In another example, if we crave conversation with God but don’t carve out time to pray, we’ll be sacrificing an important supernatural dialogue. If our relationship with the Lord is the “some day” kind, by the end of our lives we will have forfeited something precious and life-shaping.

Once in a while the relentless nature of daily tasks seems overwhelming, because they never end. I’m sure when Louisa packs her hair-cutting equipment at the end of a busy work week, there are times when she thinks, “I just can’t get away from it.”

But interestingly, God rewards our patient persistence to do the right thing. He likes that character quality, and when we work at it, he lets us get better and better at whatever we’re trying to do, especially if it’s in the spiritual realm. And best of all, he lets us know that we’re pleasing him.

When Louisa willingly gives one haircut after another, approaching each new cut with eager interest, the people she works on are drawn into her good cheer. And I believe God is nodding his approval, too.

“Patient persistence pierces through indifference.” (Proverbs 25:15a)