This Is Not the Way to Show Your Love ... Unless You're a Cat

When we first moved to Ohio when I was in high school, our house had a creek running through the back yard.  I didn’t spend a lot of time back there because of the poison ivy, but you can bet our two cats, Caspian and Dickens loved it.

Caspian and Dickens were both hunters and like most cats, enjoyed catching things and then bringing said “gifts” back to us.

Caspian, in particular, would sit outside the sliding glass doors and cry until someone—usually me—got up and acknowledged her kills.  She was always so proud.

“Yes, I see it,” I would say to Caspian through the glass and sigh.  “Yes, that’s a lovely, bird, baby bunny, snake etcetera that you have killed or worse, not quite killed, but definitely maimed.  No, I’m not opening the door.”

In today’s reading from Malachi 1:1, 6-14, we hear God chastise the Israelites for bringing him lousy gifts and offerings.  Diseased and sick animals.  Lame animals.  “Try giving these offerings to your governor and see what he does,” God suggests, angry that they were apparently otherwise fine, giving such things to Him.

God is hurt by their offerings, not because He needs a beautiful fatted calf, but because He loves the Israelites and would do anything for them, and in that moment that love seems distinctly one sided.

I imagine Him saying, “This is not how you show love to someone … unless you’re a cat.”

Here is some Bible trivia for you.  The Book of Malachi is actually the last book in the Old Testament.  Right after God, through Malachi, basically tells the Israelites that they don’t understand love, we literally turn the page to the New Testament and to Jesus—the embodiment of perfect love.

The problem with humanity and it’s still a problem thousands of years later is that we have to work really hard—it does not come naturally—to love without expectations, to love unconditionally.  Such love requires us to be vulnerable, to sometimes experience a one-sidedness in our relationships.  But I’m not talking about romantic love necessarily, but all love, the kind of love God expects us to show our neighbors and to show Him.

Humanity tends to fall back into transactional love.  Treat others the way you want to be treated is the so-called golden rule except when you then expect the other person to treat you well because you treated them well.  The relationship becomes transactional.  I do something good for you, I then expect loyalty, love, fealty and more from you and woe to you, if you don’t give in return.

Let me give you an example from today’s reading Luke 17:11-19.  Jesus meets with ten lepers (from a distance) we are told.  They beg Him for healing and He tells them to go to their priests and on their way there, they are healed.

Ten lepers.

But only one of them, and a Samaritan at that, turns around and runs back to Jesus to thank Him.

Now in a transactional relationship, Jesus might make thanking Him conditional to their being healed.  In a transactional relationship—and we see this throughout our old fables and myths—the nine who didn’t turn back to say thanks would be punished and lose whatever healing they had.

But God doesn’t have a transactional relationship with us.  His love is purely without conditions—unconditional. 

And thank goodness for that.

Because the truth is, we can never love God as much as He loves us.  Our relationship will always be one-sided, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t practice that fine art of unconditional love with Him and also with every person we come into contact with during the day.

Last night, those neighborhood girls that visit me periodically knocked on the door asking me if I wanted to buy what was now their very last box of chocolate for school—which now that I’m thinking about it may not have been their very last box, but a marketing trick to get me to buy because of FOMO—a fear of missing out.

That’s kind of genius.  I can respect that.  You can’t have capitalism without transactional relationships.

Unfortunately for the girls, I told them what I always tell them—I don’t have the money for their chocolate.

The one little girl, who is the one who sometimes knocks on my door for books, just stared at me when I told them “no.”

We were standing in uncomfortable silence and finally she said, “Do you have anymore Dr. Seuss books?”

It’s possible that the chocolate sales pitch was just a cover, so that the girl had reason to knock on my door and ask for books.

I brought out several Dr. Seuss books for her.  She had not read one, so I handed that to her.  She had read One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish, but when I didn’t immediately hand it to her as I had with the book she hadn’t read, she got quiet again.

“You said you read this one,” I said to her.

She nodded.

“Do you have a copy of it at home?”

She looked up at me and shook her head.

“Well, then,” I said, “I guess you better take this one too.”

Again, we live in a society that is transactional by nature.  No one gives anything away for free and if they do, they are usually scorned or disbelieved, thinking the gift giver must have ulterior motives.  It’s the cynical world we live in.

I’ve been saying a lot that we need to practice hope in order to combat cynicism.  Today I’m going to add to that—we must practice unconditional love too.

Faith, hope and love—these three take practice.

With my Little Free Library, I never expected the books in there would be returned and I never expected that any new books would be added.  I only expected to give away quality books for children.

Ideally, you might argue, the Little Free Library works best when the neighborhood contributes to them, and I would say, yes, absolutely and in my case, that neighborhood has been friends from here, to Georgia, to Florida contributing to the library.  There is nothing I love more than getting books in the mail.

Amazon knows this—which is why they own me.

But as I was saying, unconditional love takes practice.

Unconditional love turns our love outward instead of being hyperfocused inward.

Last week, a boy took a rock and smashed out the window of my neighbor’s house across the street.  My Ring doorbell caught it all except for the kid’s face.

When the neighbor knocked on my door a few days later to see if I had caught anything on video, I could see how upset and defeated he was.  He had lived in the neighborhood for sixty years and had never had anything like this happen.  His shoulders were slumped, his voice soft.

“I just can’t believe it,” he said over and over.

As someone at church on Sunday pointed out to me, “It must have upset you too, even though it wasn’t your house?”

And yes, it was upsetting to me, though if it had been my house I would have bolted outside and chased that kid … about fifteen feet until I collapsed.

But yes, it is an upsetting thing when something bad happens in a place you had always been safe in, as my neighbor had.

But as frustrated as I get with the world, it doesn’t stop me from putting books in my Little Free Library. 

It’s how I practice unconditional love.

It’s how I pour God’s divine love into this little plot of land.

It is love, but also hope that this love will grow and flourish if it is nurtured.

So in all you do this week, practice love as Jesus taught us, not as how the cats have shown us.

Amen.

Miracles

 A few hours ago, I went out to blow leaves off the driveway.  My leaf blower has the horsepower of a small hair dryer and I guarantee if I look out the back window right now, the driveway will be covered with leaves again.

I don’t understand where all these leaves are coming from.

Well, they’re coming from the trees, Kendra, duh, you might say, especially if you’re feeling cranky and don’t have the energy for me not recognizing the obvious.

But, I would say to you, the trees are practically bare.  How is it that they manage to sneeze off a whole tree’s worth of leaves every few hours?

I’m exhausted by the leaves.

And yet, as the leaves fall away, I get a clearer picture of the church around the corner.  And without the leaves to dampen the sound, I hear the church bells all throughout the day.  Most of the time, I tune them out, but sometimes they sneak through.  I think the bells stir my spirit first and my spirit taps my brain on the shoulder and says, “Hey, pay attention.”

Ten years ago today—yes, before you ask, yes it has really been ten years—ten years ago today, my mom called me from the hospital to tell me they had found a mass on her pancreas.  They had found more than that, actually, but her ears had shut down after the first bit, the part about the pancreatic mass.  She didn’t hear the rest, the even larger mass on her abdominal wall, the lesions on her spleen and liver.  She didn’t hear the part about Stage IV pancreatic cancer.  For a moment, her subconscious saved her and muted the doctor’s words. 

One of the hardest things to understand for both believers and non-believers alike is that believing in God does not keep bad things from happening to us.  But believing in God does help inoculate us against despair.  It helps us realize we are not alone—that God walks with us through it all.  When we believe in God, when we believe in goodness and righteousness, when we dare to hope, though others scoff at our perceived naivety, we open the door for God to step into our lives and do miraculous things.

No, God’s miracle was not saving my mom’s life.  She died seven weeks after her diagnosis. 

God’s miracle came some years later when one Sunday, I happened to notice in the church bulletin a call for spiritual care volunteers at the hospital.  And I felt God trouble the waters of my still grieving spirit and I volunteered—me, an immunocompromised introvert—to sit with people, the sick and the dying, with strangers, during their darkest times.

You see, because of my health, and because of my mom’s wishes for me to not risk my health for her, I wasn’t able to be with her those final weeks of her life.

But because of God’s miracles, miracles that seed themselves in our lives and sometimes need a long time to grow to fruition, I have now sat with dozens of people near the end or at the end of their lives.  I have prayed fiercely for them and with them.  I have stared into their eyes the moment when they stop seeing the inside of the hospital room and start seeing instead the boundaries of heaven.  I have held their hands. 

And I am the one who has been blessed.

When the days get colder, when winter approaches, all I want to do is sleep and eat—I enter bear-mode, hibernation mode and woe to anyone who crosses me.

But the season of fall is a season of transformation.

The leaves fall.

The trees are bare.

But in that barrenness, there is revelation.

Suddenly there is nothing separating me from my neighbor’s backyard and the laughter of their children joins with the church bells.  I step out my backdoor and force myself to look up away from the fallen leaves and to the barren trees.  There now is the church steeple and in the early morning at sunrise, that cross shines.

God is always present.  And if we think He is hiding Himself from us, consider this—the state of the world, the pattern of the seasons is always transformation and revelation.  And God is present through it all.

Sometimes, our greatest joy comes from not knowing.  Our greatest joy comes from the anticipation and from the belief that when revelation occurs, it will be something bigger and more awesome than we could ever imagine.

Miracles await in every season.

What Hope Sounds Like

Yesterday morning, I went over to my dad and stepmom’s house to do laundry.  They are out of town and my stepsister has been coming over to feed their cat Lucy.  Lucy is an awesome cat, perhaps made more awesome because of her love for me.  Cats are not dogs.  They are infinitely more discerning when it comes to liking anyone.  But Lucy is a cat who, as soon as she hears my voice, will come running.  And with her being left alone for a few days, I expected her to be crying and running to me as soon as she heard the door open.

But when I stepped into the house yesterday and called for Lucy, there was only silence.

“Lucy!”  I called again.

Nothing.

I wondered if maybe my stepsister had decided to bring Lucy to her own house while my dad and Barb were out of town.

“Lucy!” I called one more time.

And this time, she answered, loudly.  I said, her name again and she responded again, loudly crying out. 

And yet, she still hadn’t made an appearance.

Her cries became louder and even more insistent.  I was starting to worry that she was hurt or sick or trapped somewhere.

And then, I spotted her.  She was downstairs in the finished basement.  She was looking at something by the bar area, and I thought she had perhaps cornered a spider.

“Lucy,” I said, pounding down the stairs.

She walked a few feet to me and then plopped down on the floor, crying still and rolling around on her back, showing me her belly.

I gave her a vigorous belly rub.

“What is going on with you?” I asked her.

She stood back up and walked back over to the bar, still crying.

And now I could see, there was something on the floor.  I flipped on the light and finally saw what had Lucy so excited.

Lucy had caught her first mouse.

The mouse was very small and very cute and still alive.  With the help of a Tupperware container and a paper plate, I managed to trap it, so I could take it outside.

As I carried the mouse up the stairs, though, I realized that I had caught a bit of its tail under the edge of the Tupperware.  I apologized to the mouse.  “I know it hurts,” I said.  “I am so sorry.  Just hang with me one more minute.  I’m getting you back outside.  It’s going to be okay.  I know you’re afraid.  But it’s going to be okay.”

Outside, I found a small pile of golden leaves, dry and crackling.  I set the plate down and took off the Tupperware.  The mouse sat up, nose and whiskers twitching and then it took a few tentative steps off the plate.  A second later, he found a hole in the leaves and vanished.

I am sitting here writing this just before 3 am in the early morning hours following the presidential election.  I can’t sleep.  And at some point, when you can’t sleep, you might as well get up and try to be productive.  So, I got up, took some vitamins, ate some sugar and drank some water.  I do believe proper hydration is the key to everything … and also chocolate.

No matter how the election turned out, a number of people were going to be left feeling frightened for themselves, for their loved ones, for the state of the world.  In many ways, we are, right now, a lot like that mouse Lucy caught.  We are not the mouse, on the floor, playing dead, hoping the cat will get bored and walk away.  Rather, we are the mouse I carried from the basement, and up the stairs and out into the woods.  We are the mouse on a journey we did not plan.  We have no idea where we are going and we are terrified and shaken as to what the future holds.

This is life, quite frankly. 

Our hope, though, rests in the ever-living and ever-loving God.  Much as I carried the mouse to safety, God carries us, always. 

The other day, I was watching TV and like many people today, I watch with the closed-captioning on and I was struck that during a particularly meaningful part of the show, as the music swelled, the closed-captioning read, “Hopeful music playing.”

It could have just said “music playing” but it added an adjective, “hopeful.”

And I wondered to myself what does hopeful music sound like?

What does hope sound like?

I bet it sounds different for each of us.

Like for a boxer, beaten and bloody, hope may sound like the bell ringing out the end of the round, right before he passes out.

Sometimes for me, hope sounds like my cat, Pippin, sitting on my chest, purring loudly.  Hope in that case, is not just a sound but a feeling too.  His purring rumbles inside of me.

Perhaps for that mouse yesterday, hope was the rustling sound the leaves made as he scurried to safety.

Perhaps for you, hope today is the sound of my voice in your head as you read this, a voice telling you, “I know you’re afraid.  It’s going to be okay.”

Perhaps hope is from today’s reading from the Wisdom of Ben Sira when we are reminded in Ecclesiasticus 43:27, “We could say more but could never say enough; let the final word be: ‘He is the all.’”

God is the all.

And we are blessed to be held by Him.

We are blessed to be carried by Him.

We are blessed even when our little hearts race and our whiskers twitch.

We are blessed to live in hope.

Always.

Amen.

When Leaves Fall Like Rain

The other morning, I decided to mow the lawn.  The temperature was in the thirties and you might be wondering if the lawn really needed to be mowed, especially at this time of year.  And so let me clarify—it wasn’t the grass that needed mowing, it was the leaves.

The leaves are driving me crazy.  The lawn looks messy.

And when I was a kid, my dad would send me out to rake up the leaves, but I am not a kid anymore and raking is not something I am physically capable of doing.  And my leaf blower isn’t strong enough to move wet leaves, clinging to damp grass and yesterday’s frosty leftovers.

So I mowed the leaves.

I have a tiny little yard.  It did not take long.  It still exhausted me.  But when I was through, the lawn looked good.

Success.

Several hours later, I peered out the front window to get another look at my beautiful lawn.

You can probably guess what I saw.

The lawn was covered in a sea of yellow leaves, the wind moving through them in waves.  It was as if the tree had said to its leaves, “Look, she made room for us down there.  Go on now, get.  Shoo.”

Or more accurately, it looked like every tree on the block had sneezed on my yard.

Why do I even bother, right?

In today’s reading from Luke 11:37-52, we see a side to Jesus that maybe we aren’t so used to seeing.  We’re used to see Jesus exhibit an extraordinary amount of patience with people (with the exception maybe of the flipping the tables thing), but here He just tears into the Pharisees.  He calls them “fools” in verse 40 and then three times, in verses 42, 43 and 44 He says to them, “Woe to you!”

All of which causes the lawyers to respond with a different kind of “whoa” as in “Whoa there Jesus, when you insult them, you insult us,” which means that these lawyers never learned the lesson that when Mom and Dad are yelling at your brother and sister, you, never, never draw their attention to you.

Because here Jesus rips into the lawyers too again with the “Woe to yous” in verses 46, 47 and 52. 

And perhaps I am projecting a little bit, but I have to wonder if Jesus is exhausted here, if cynicism is beginning to grow within Him, if He is starting to think, “Why even bother?”

We are God’s creation, but we are horribly flawed.  Why even bother?

And yet, Jesus does bother.

Thank goodness.

Because underneath our sinful stinkiness, is an inner core, a fertile spirit, already seeded with hope and promise.

God sees this in each one of us.

God knows who we truly are and the goodness we are capable of, and the power of that goodness when it breaks through to the surface.

It is why Jesus says again and again to people who He meets, that it is their faith that has saved them.

In Luke 18:42, Jesus tells the blind man, “Receive your sight; your faith has saved you.”

In Luke 7:50, Jesus says to the woman who bathed His feet with her tears, “Your faith has saved you; go in peace.”

To the bleeding woman in Mark 5:34, Jesus says, “Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace, and be healed of your disease.”

It is the power of God’s love working within us—it is the faith that moves mountains—it is an infinitely deep well of God’s living water that nourishes our spirit.

It is hope.

It is too easy these days to give in to cynicism, to believe what we are told again and again about the worst of people, to think “why bother” when nothing in the world seems good, when everyone seems in it for themselves, when selflessness, when charity and grace seem in short supply.

Cynicism is easy.

Hope is hard.

But it is critical to living our best lives.

As Vaclav Havel once said, “Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.”

And if I may be so bold to add to that.  Hope is knowing that no matter what, God is right there in the middle of it with us and that He believes in the best of us.

Cynics tell us that they are realists.  But time and again, God shows us that true realists exist in a state of hope.

As Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 13:12-13, “For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known. And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.”

So why do I mow the leaves?  Even when I know that the swirling winds of autumn will drop a stormful of even more leaves just a few hours later?

I do it to practice hope.

I do it because I read that mulching the leaves nourishes and fertilizes the ground.

I do it not for the now, but for the spring.

I do it for the future.

None of us knows what our future holds which is why it is so desperately important that every decision we make is one that focuses on hope and love and not cynicism and disgust disguised as realism.

God is our reality.

And He is love.

And He is hope.

And He is all we need.

Amen.

God Loves Me

This past Friday, I stepped outside to get pictures of the rain for my next book.  The heavier rain had tapered off to a simple drizzle and I was mesmerized, as I frequently am, by the little things, the ripples created by the raindrops in the puddles, the raindrops themselves suspended on blades of grass.  It was peaceful and a reminder of how important it is for my spiritual self, to get out in nature and feel God’s presence, even if I’m only a few steps from the backdoor.

I hadn’t brought my phone with me while I was outside, but I was close to my phone that when it rang, as it wound up doing that morning, my watch buzzed and chimed to let me know.

I didn’t recognize the number, but I was pretty sure who it was.  Every time I publish a book, I start getting spammed by scammers from overseas trying to get me to give them money to publish and market my book.  I ignore most of these calls, but occasionally, I feel in a good enough mood to answer the phone and warn them that they are breaking the law (I have no idea if that’s true) and that I will report them if they continue their harassment.  The last time I answered one of these calls a couple of months ago, I had the caller so frustrated with me getting him off his script that he hung up on me.

Once or twice I have thought about the fact that given all the books I write these days are about God, I should use these phone calls with scammers as a witnessing opportunity.

And when the phone rang this past Friday, when I was feeling calm and filled with God from my time outside, I decided to answer the phone, (or answer my watch in this case).  I didn’t know what I would say to caller, but I figured I would start by asking if they had read my book.  I mean why should I do business, I would ask them, if they hadn’t even read my book.

Because of the rain and because I was talking Dick Tracy-style on my watch, I was having a hard time hearing the man on the other end.  I had no idea which one of my books he was talking about and he wasn’t taking a breath to let me talk to him or even hang up semi-politely. 

I was just about ready to interject my question about whether or not he had read my book, when he said something that no one in the hundreds of calls like these that I had answered over the years had ever said to me.

“I read the synopsis of your book on Amazon,” he said to me.  “And the words ‘God loves me’ really spoke to me.”

Much as I suspected, he had not read the book, but no one had ever told me they had read what my book was about and no one had ever quoted me words from the book.

I now knew exactly what book he was talking about, my latest entitled, I Wrote These Words for You. 

“I’m glad they spoke to you,” I said, somewhat hesitantly.  Was he being real with me or was this just more of the scam?  He was very off-script either way.

“I just really needed to hear those words today, ‘God loves me’” he continued.  “I’m having a hard time at home and work.”

Again, I wasn’t quite ready to believe him, though I was getting more intrigued by the second.  “You should really read my book,” I told him.  “If those words meant something to you, you need to read the book.”

And then he said something—and I can’t quite remember how he worded it—but it was something along the lines of that he would have a hard time getting a copy of the book.

At that point, I was thinking, well he’s already on Amazon, just click on the “buy it now” button, but then I remembered that these calls were from overseas—I actually got a woman to admit to me once how they ping off of cellphone towers, preferably a tower close to where you are so that you are more likely to pick up the phone.

So he was most likely not calling me from inside the United States and it hit me right then that what he was doing right then, going off script, talking to me about God, might be very dangerous for him.

“Look,” I said to him, “I hope you’re being honest with me—I’m going to assume you’re being honest with me and I want you to know that I’m praying for you.”

“Thank you,” he said.

“Really,” I continued, “I am praying for you right now.  I am praying that God put His hand on you, that He fill you with His spirit, that when He does fill you with that spirit that He would lift you up and put you on the path He wants you on.”

As I was talking, I felt myself getting louder and louder because I was ready to fight for this man.

As I spoke, he sometimes broke in.  He told me how much the prayers meant to him and sometimes it seemed like he was trying to get back on the script he was supposed to be on.  Perhaps so that when his employers questioned him later, because I have no doubt they either listen in live or perhaps later, but he could create a plausible deniability and insist by going back to the script, he was just playing me.

All of it just made me pray harder.

Finally, I ended the call.  I told him I would keep praying for him.  I told him to take care.  And then I hung up.

Still outside, I noticed the rain had stopped.  The air smelled sweet.  The word for it is “petrichor.”  It’s that earthly, damp dirt smell we all are familiar with after the rain.

“God loves me.”

Three words.

Three words had changed the course of that man’s day and perhaps his life.

In today’s reading from John 6:1-15, we get the feeding of the 5,000 miracle, the fishes and loaves miracle.  But what I want to focus on specifically is the part after the feeding, when Jesus tells the disciples, “Gather up the fragments.”  Now those words have a deep meaning, especially when we are told those fragments filled twelve baskets.  Numbers always have meaning in the Bible and these are no different.

But rather than go into that, I want to just focus on those words, “Gather up the fragments.”

Get the crumbs.

Nothing goes to waste.

I remember how my depression-era grandparents would practically lick the plate clean at dinner, suck every ounce of chicken off the bone, because they knew how important those crumbs were.

And yet food waste in this country is astounding and I admit to being a large part of that.

But Jesus tells the disciples, “Gather up the fragments,” because nothing goes to waste.  Nothing, not one crumb, is unimportant.

This past Friday, God fed that man on the phone with me, with spiritual crumbs.

Three words.

Of course, I know and have come to terms with the fact that my books will never be bestsellers, but that doesn’t mean that God can’t use three words from one of those books to change a man’s life a half a world away.

I confessed last week that the thing I hate/dread the most about writing my books is having to write that back cover summary.  I never feel good about anything I write in those summaries.  The words feel weak and not a good representation of the book itself.

And yet, last Friday, it was the summary that reached that man.

And even less than that.

Three words.

God loves me.

How will God use your words to reach someone today?

Amen.

The God Who Sees Me

Back when I was living in Florida, I used to wake up every morning before sunrise and go for a walk.  I loved walking in the dark, in the silence, under the stars.  I loved the way the moon seemed to follow me as I walked.  I loved how God seemed to fill all the empty spaces, the spaces that normally get filled during the day with noise and clamor, with things that seem to assault our senses, rather than God and His presence which seem to fill our senses.

For those of you wondering if me walking in the dark was safe, I can say that mostly I walked laps around my gated condo complex.  It was a well-lit parking lot.  And on the occasions when I ventured out to the street beyond the condo, I took a large flashlight with me.  The scariest things I ran into were usually giant raccoons and fence-walking possums.

And the worst I was ever hurt was the time I stepped into a sewer grate in a particularly dark and unlit portion of the parking lot.

Some mornings, I started my walk later, closer to sunrise and usually made my way out to the supersized sidewalks, large enough to accommodate golf carts, by the street.  I loved watching the sunrise.  I loved watching the green herons and the great blue herons catching breakfast by the ponds and canals.  But venturing out closer to sunrise meant encountering more people on my walk.

And in my neighborhood, it was expected that you would say “good morning” to every single person you saw, though if you happened to lap back and come across them twice, it was okay to simply smile or wave the second time around, but you had to acknowledge everyone.

And, as an introvert who enjoys her morning silent meditation walks, I admit to turning around, or crossing the street just to avoid having to interact with someone.

I want you to keep my story in the back of your mind as we begin to explore today’s reading from John 4:1-26.  Jesus and his disciples are headed to Galilee and have stopped in the Samaritan town of Sychar.  Jesus is tired, we are told and decides to sit and rest at Jacob’s Well, while the disciples head out to find food.  It is around noon.

A short time later, a Samaritan woman approaches the well and here is where it gets interesting.  Though we are given so much context about Jesus and why he is at the well, the real question is why is the Samaritan woman there.

It’s noon.  It’s the hottest part of the day.  Why is she fetching water at that moment and not earlier in the day when it’s cooler?

Biblical scholars—of which I am NOT one—seem to agree that the woman has come to the well later in the day specifically to avoid people.  Having been married five times and currently living with a man who is not her husband, she has a reputation and is most likely tired of the looks and the whispers and the micro aggressions that count as bullying in Jesus’s time.

She’s coming to the well at noon with the hope that no one will be there.

And that part I can relate to.

And so maybe I’m projecting a little when I imagine her catching sight of the well and seeing that someone is there.  And not just any someone—a man, and not just any man but a Jewish man.

Perhaps for a second, she thinks about turning around, about coming back later, but she needs the water and so she takes a deep breath, straightens her back, squares her shoulders and heads to the well, hoping to get her water without incident.

Little does she know her life is about to change forever.

It is quite right that the man at the well is no ordinary man.  Jesus shows that immediately, when he dispenses with all small talk.  No hello.  No “Boy it’s hot, isn’t it?”  Instead, he asks—no not even asks—it’s not worded as a question.  He says to her, “Give me a drink.”

But the Samaritan woman is no push-over.  To have lived the life she has lived, she has had to be very tough and so she says to Jesus, “How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?”

He says, “If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, 'Give me a drink,' you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water."

Jesus’s response is such that she should have had goosebumps popping out on her skin even though it was the hottest part of an already hot day.

Instead, it’s clear that she is only half listening, perhaps anxious to be on her way.  She practically scoffs at his answer of living water.

“You don’t even have a bucket,” she says to him, “and the well is deep.”

Jesus explains further.  “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.”

Now she is starting to pay attention but still not quite getting it.  She asks him for the water so she can stop coming to the well.

And then Jesus, like any good teacher who knows it’s time to try something else, asks her about her husband, even though, as he later reveals, he knows she has no husband currently.

And this is what opens the Samaritan woman’s eyes.  Much like Hagar who in Genesis 16:13, on the run from Abram and Sarai, encounters God and names Him “the God who sees me,” the Samaritan woman encounters the same God, leaving behind her water pitcher and running back into the city to announce in verse 29, “Come and see a man who told me everything I have ever done!”

She has been seen.

She has encountered God, there at the well named for Abraham’s grandson Jacob.

She left her home that day, hoping to be left alone, and instead she found God.

Back when I was taking my early morning, still-dark, walks, I was paradoxically wanting to be alone and yet also wanting to experience God’s presence.

And as I think back on it, I can’t think of a single morning, when I didn’t feel God’s presence.

God was everywhere and in between.  He was in the chorus of frogs singing through the wet morning air from the shadows in the wetlands.  He was in the blazing arc of the rockets that split the black sky before dawn.

And when I stood there and looked up at that endless sky, I knew, without a doubt that I was seen.

Amen.

 

 

 

 

The Power of Your Story

One day, last week, the doorbell rang.  It was about one o’clock in the afternoon, and my visitors were both a surprise and yet not entirely unexpected.  It was the same girl who has been to my door several times over the last few weeks, offering me a handmade bracelet for a buck, offering me a smells-good-stick for three bucks—she and other children in the neighborhood have been frequent visitors. 

I was a little surprised to see them in the afternoon.  Normally, they come much later, like when I am fast asleep on the couch or in the recliner.

But the other day, they came in the afternoon and the little girl, there with her two little brothers and an older girl who I think was just a friend, asked me if I had a stroller she could borrow so she could take her little sister out.

I’m not exaggerating when I say that every time this girl comes to my door I have about a dozen questions for her and this time was no different, though I kept the questions to myself.

Like, why don’t you have a stroller?  Where is your little sister now?  Who is watching her?  Who is watching you?  Are you going from house to house asking for a stroller?  What made you think I might have one?  Where are you taking your sister in this stroller?

But instead of asking these questions, I simply told the girl that I was sorry but I didn’t have a stroller.

“We’d bring it back,” the girl said, as if realizing her ask might be too much.  “We just need to borrow it.”

Again, the questions—I wanted so desperately to know what was going on and, while I repeated I didn’t have a stroller, I was stalling some, hoping she might tell me more of what was happening.

But she didn’t.  And she and the other children walked off.

And I was left to wonder.

I have always been fascinated by people’s stories.  Consequently, I get frustrated when people send me texts with no context, or when someone tells me something and when I have follow up questions, they have no answers.  I want the full picture.

This past Monday, I was at the tire store, getting four new tires—yay—except that I hadn’t planned on being there.  I had planned on just popping in for a quote and then setting up an appointment later in the week, but the quote they gave was good and they said they could put the new tires on right then—it would only take about two hours.

Well, why not? I said to myself.

So I sat down in the waiting area resigning myself to sit there for the next two hours inhaling tire fumes, but not only that—I hadn’t brought a book to read.  The tire place didn’t even have a TV on.  What in the world was I going to do for two hours?

I texted my dad, told him where I was and that I was bookless.  I mentioned maybe walking across the street to Target to buy a book and then said, surely I could handle sitting alone with my thoughts for the next two hours.

Haha.  Hahaha.

We, as humans, especially in this day and age, are not wired for alone time.  For silence.  For nothing but the company of our own thoughts.

Now, you might wonder why I couldn’t simply get on my phone for the next two hours, get on Facebook or go shopping on Amazon for more books—or why I simply couldn’t read a book on my phone.

And to that I say, I have a very tiny phone, with a tiny screen and I have bad eyes, so that in order to read a book on my phone, I would need to enlarge the font so that it was basically one word at a time.

Twas swipe the swipe night swipe before swipe Christmas swipe.

I tried to read on my phone.  I truly did.  But after a few minutes, I gave up.

And then it was just me and my thoughts in a waiting room with other people and their thoughts and their phones.

The boredom, the ennui, was crushing.

And then I started writing a story—in my head.  The man sitting across from me had a bandage on his arm, inside his elbow.  I started Sherlock Holmesian him.  He had had bloodwork.  What was the bloodwork for?  Was it routine?  Had he missed work?  How had he wound up here?  Were those Nikes he was wearing real or knock-offs?

Don’t tell me you’ve never made up stories about strangers you see in the doctor’s office or at the airport.

There is a reason that reading stories with children is so important—there are many reasons—but the most important reason is that reading stories with children builds empathy, that it is important for all of humanity to be exposed to other people’s stories from the very start of our lives so that we know that the world does not revolve around us, so that we know that while we are the main character in our own stories, there are millions of other stories out there most of which we won’t even grace the page as a background character.

Stories connect us to each other.

Stories help us be less self-centered and more world-centered.

This past Sunday, President Joe Biden announced that he would not be running for re-election.  Joe Biden has been in politics for a very long time, longer than I have been alive.  My mom loved him—I never knew why but I think she was drawn, like so many, to his bumbling, goofy self.  Joe always had a story to tell.  Sometimes it wasn’t his story.  Sometimes he borrowed that story from someone else, but he was like that uncle we all had, that family member at the holidays that always had some whopper of a tale to tell that you knew was not remotely true, but couldn’t help yourself from being drawn in.

Part of the reason, President Biden lasted so long in politics was because of his ability to empathize with everyone.  He knew the power of a person’s story.  He knew the power of his story.

President Biden was elected to the senate at the age of 29—the youngest ever, and shortly after his wife and his children were in a horrible car accident that took the lives of his wife and daughter.

Jon Meacham, noted historian, speech-writer and fellow Episcopalian recently wrote of Biden, that after the death of his wife and daughter, Biden “endured, found purpose in his pain, became deeper, wiser, more empathetic.”

Stories, when we read them, help us find meaning in others’ pain.

Stories, when we write them, can help us find purpose in our own pain.

Suffering is universal.

Empathy, unfortunately, is not.

It’s a skill that needs to be learned and strengthened and renewed over time.

We should always, always strive to know people better, to understand them better, to recognize their pain in our own lives, to make that connection to them.

A few days after that little girl came by, asking if I had a stroller, I watched her and several other kids walking past my house.  The little girl was pushing a shopping cart.  One of her brothers was in the basket of the cart and, what I can only assume was her sister, was sitting in the child’s seat of the cart.

They had found their stroller.

And I had a dozen more unanswered questions.

I share the stories of these children with you because every time I do, I make them real to everyone who reads about them, to everyone who hears about them.  They are not statistics.  They are not numbers.  They are real, living and breathing human beings, who exist and love and hurt and laugh and together, with us, are all children of God.

Amen.