Thinking it through.

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My nephew-in-law has worked hard renovating my old cottage for 8 weeks, running into his share of negative surprises. He’s ripped up a floor, built a new one, covered it with slate, laid hardwood in the kitchen, corrected a structural problem, made a hole for a decorative window, sanded and refinished wood floors and built a wall of bookshelves.

But by far his greatest challenge was the back stairway, 12 steps with two turns and two landings. It would have been simple if each step had had the same measurements, but no two were exactly alike in height or depth.

Every so often I’d come around the corner and find Drew just looking at the steps. “How’s it going?” I’d say.

“I’m thinking it through.”

When everything is “off” just a little, pondering the project is critical to its success. And Scripture says we’re to count the cost before every commitment, not just the ones that don’t look right to begin with. Drew’s “thinking it through” was exactly that.

Our remodeling has been like those 3” puzzles we used to play with as kids, 8 tiny, sliding square pieces and one space. As we slid the flat pieces up, down and sideways, the surface picture began to come together. It wouldn’t make sense till every piece was in the right spot.

Sometimes it was necessary to push a piece 2 spaces left, 1 down and 3 up before it found its proper place. And moving the last square into position necessitated sliding most of the others around to make a path for it. Drew tackled my house the same way, doing things in order but always preceded by careful planning.

Sadly, I lean toward slap-dash, the opposite of counting the cost. If I’d have built our stairway, the finished product would have looked like something out of Dr. Seuss. Good intentions minus thinking-it-through equal costly destruction later.

I wonder if God watches people like me putting incomplete ideas into place too soon and thinks, “You’d better stop and think first. How about measuring again? Oops, you forgot to count the cost.”

Most of the messes we get ourselves into are the result of not pondering, measuring, counting. For example, we end up with addictions because we don’t consider the end before we begin. A teen finds herself pregnant, because she didn’t reflect on that possibility. A business goes bankrupt because of over-borrowing.

Jesus was the one who cautioned us about counting the cost. When he said it, he was referencing the price of becoming his follower, which doesn’t come cheaply. It was extremely expensive to him to allow us to join him, and it can be costly to us as we do. He was urging us to think about that before we committed.

But just like Drew’s careful thinking about my complicated stairway, if we ponder our commitment to Christ and measure the cost, in the end our lives will square off well.

Jesus said, “Which one of you, when he wants to build a tower, does not first sit down and calculate the cost?” (Luke14:28a)

Growth Spurt

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All of us grandmas love our grands. They bring fresh energy into our aging worlds and insist on hope for the future. They also let us squeeze their beautiful baby flesh.

My five grands, age 2 and under, live many miles from me, and while we’re apart they’re growing and changing. This week I received a packet of new pictures from my daughter-in-law, Katy, sent from their home in England.

As I studied each photo, my heart ached to be with these little people. I hardly recognized Thomas and Evelyn, nearly 6 months older than when I saw them last. When you’re only 1 year old, half a year causes dramatic change.

Last night I watched a several-minute video on Facebook of my 2 Florida babies playing in the tub. Listening to Skylar sing “Old McDonald” as she poured water, oblivious to being videoed, made me want to log onto www.cheaptickets.com

If these 5 would stay the same as when I left them last, our separations wouldn’t be so bad. But they continually change in appearance and grow in skills, no matter how badly I want them to stop. Nicholas and Micah have quintupled their vocabulary, and I’ve not been there to talk with them. That hurts! The only way to cope with this disturbing phenomenon is to keep in touch as best we can and schedule times of togetherness.

From the perspective of my 5 grands, I’m not changing much. I probably seem exactly the same to them, each time we’re together, but the truth is I’m changing, too. Steadily and surely I’m accumulating more wrinkles, gaining in forgetfulness and losing in strength. As much as I’d like to halt those changes, I can’t.

So my babies are changing, I’m changing, and then there is Nate.

From an earthly perspective, he’ll be forever 64. In his absence I’ve turned 65 and soon will hit 66. Although we were always 10 days apart in age, today we’ve grown 528 days apart. He’ll stay put, and I’ll keep counting. He’ll never have gray hair or get senile. His life as Nathan Nyman is frozen in time the way I wish my grandchildren would freeze between visits and my aging would come to a screeching halt.

Of course the reality of Nate’s agelessness is that he’s actually changed more dramatically than me or any of my 5 grands. He’s brand new, glorified, radically different. If I could get a glimpse of him, I’d probably gasp in wonder. It’s encouraging to know God has promised that all of us will one day be changed in the same ways Nate has been. The clock will stop, and we’ll be glad.

But there’s a catch: we have to wait until God schedules the change, because even www.cheaptickets.com can’t make it happen.

”In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye… we shall be changed.” (1 Corinthians 15:52)

Can we understand?

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Nate and I sat in front of a panel of doctors at a Chicago hospital and heard the words “terminal cancer,” but didn’t take it in.

That’s probably a typical response to a deadly diagnosis. It’s an acquaintance none of us want to make, so our minds rebuff it. Days later, the words and their meaning sink in, and because there’s no other choice, we accept our challenge and try our best. But while we’re suffering, our questions pile up. God answers some, but for the most part, he doesn’t give us a satisfying understanding.

A parallel situation occurs as we parent our children. We try to be mini-versions of God, raising them with what wisdom we have, trying to imitate the way he wisely raises us. Part of that is taking kids to the doctor for regular well-care. When we hold them down for a vaccination, we allow such “abuse” for only one reason: it brings benefit to them. But can they understand that? Of course not.

They cry and kick, trying to get away, but we force the issue, knowing the importance of protecting them from deadly diseases. We have valid reasons, but they don’t understand them. Children live in the “now” which during a vaccination hurts a great deal.

As adults we ought not to live in the “now”, but we often do. Harsh circumstances come and we demand that God explain himself. “How could you? Don’t you love us? Why didn’t you stop this?” As the diagnosis comes, the accident happens, the heartbreak occurs, we cry and kick to get away, because we can’t understand the reasons for it.

But God definitely has his reasons. He could explain himself, but just like a parent in the pediatrician’s office, if he did, we wouldn’t hear him. I’ve actually tried explaining the needles to my children as they’ve seen them coming: “It’ll feel bad now, but later you won’t get the measles!” Not one of them accepted my reasons for their agony. They just screamed louder, drowning out my explanation.

If God sat us down and shared his reasons for letting cancer or any other tragedy come to us, just like a child in the doctor’s office, his explanation would go unheard. It wouldn’t lessen the misery of the moment, so it wouldn’t satisfy us. We’d just drown it out with our objections.

And so he doesn’t explain, at least not while we’re in crisis mode. Later, usually much later, he offers bits of his reasoning. Then, depending on our response, he might offer more. One truth ribboned throughout Scripture is that if we take one step toward him, he takes one-thousand toward us.

Like Moses in front of the burning bush that wasn’t consumed, when he turned toward it looking for an answer to what he couldn’t understand, then God spoke to him.

It’s difficult to find peace within pain. But God’s message to us is, “Look at me, and you’ll hear from me.”

“When the Lord saw that [Moses] turned aside to look, God called to him from the midst of the bush.” (Exodus 3:4)