TRY NOT TO SNEEZE ON THE ELEVATOR

The other day, I was in the elevator when I noticed a woman hurrying to catch it just as the doors were beginning to close.  Quickly, I hit the open doors button and the woman squeezed in just in time.  She immediately turned to face the door and put her face into her elbow.

“Oh, you’re going to regret that,” she said to me, “because I’m about to sneeze.”

Yesterday I was working on updating the cover to my book Prayers in the Pandemic which I wrote during 2020, during lockdowns and quarantines, during mask-wearing and one-way aisles in the grocery store.  I wrote a prayer a day for many days and posted them on Facebook, hoping they might provide some comfort.

It’s been six years, but Covid and what happened in 2020 have changed our lives forever.  Not just in the self-checkout lanes that are ubiquitous now in every grocery store, not just in our children being attached to a screen everywhere from home to school and everywhere in between. 

Covid changed how we communicate with each other, in good ways and in bad.  In those early days of the lockdown, I shared a virtual lunch with a friend as she and I Facetimed each other and ate our lunches in front of each other.  At church, we took advantage of the beautiful Florida weather and gathered outside for Morning Prayer.  Every Tuesday, I met a friend of mine at her church, and we walked her church’s prayer labyrinth and prayed.  Somedays, I gathered with friends in the front yard of our former pastor’s house for fellowship, for communion, for reminders that God was indeed present everywhere.

But the truth is that Covid enabled the digital world to become the primary method of communication in the world.  Younger generations now date less, hang out with friends less.  They are content to just message each other on their phones.  There’s a certain safety there.

On Monday, I received my very first iron infusion.  It was not a private room.  And shortly after they brought me back and started to get me hooked up, they brought another woman, an older woman back for her infusion.  I don’t know what she was there for.  I’m always hesitant to ask in those situations because your health information should be private.  You shouldn’t feel like you need to share that.

We didn’t speak to each other at first, even after the nurses left us and the only reason we wound up speaking at all was because when the nurse came in to hook me up to my bag of iron, the bag of iron looked like blood.  It looked like I was getting a blood transfusion and so I commented to the nurse about that and when he left, the other patient spoke up commenting on my blood-colored medicine.  And so I wound up sharing a bit of my story.

Since it was my first infusion, she gave me some tips—she told me not to be afraid to tell them you needed to use the restroom.  And I was a little afraid because the way you communicated that you needed help with something was to ring a little bell they gave you, like I was some kind of Downton Abbey dowager summoning the servants.

In today’s reading, Jesus encounters a Samaritan woman at the well.  It’s a story we are all probably familiar with.  Jesus asks the woman for some water.  She comments on how their two people are not on exactly water-getting terms.  Jesus mentions the living water he can give her.  The woman totally misses the point and scoffs telling Him, “You don’t even have a bucket.”

Here is the interesting thing about the gospels.  Virtually every story is an encounter story.  We see little of Jesus’ interior life, His thoughts, His hopes, His doubts.  We see a little bit of it at Gethsemane.  We are told sometimes that Jesus went off by Himself to pray.  I call Jesus the extroverted introvert.  He loves people, but He needs time to recharge alone.  But most of what happens with Jesus happens in conversation. 

And it’s why His words on the cross, “My God, my God why have You forsaken me?” are so devastating.  He is, in the end, alone, but that’s a sermon for another day given by someone far more knowledgeable about the context and the meaning of those words.

But today’s reading is about encounter.  And it only happens because the Samaritan woman is at the well at the wrong time.  She is there in the heat of the day.  It’s the worst possible time to go get water.  But she chooses that time because she hopes she will be alone.  She is a pariah because of her fluid relationships with men.  And she’s tired of it.  She’s tired of the judgement and gossip and the hate.

So she comes to the well to get water and instead finds there is a Jewish man already there waiting for her.

She might have turned around, but she needed the water.

She did not need conversation, but Jesus spoke anyway.

And note this—He didn’t start by declaring Himself the Messiah and sermonizing.

He began with small talk.  “Could I have some water?”

And that small talk opened a door so wide, that the Samaritan woman abandoned her water, and ran off back to town, back to the people who ridiculed her and became an evangelist.

I personally am horrible at small talk.  When I would visit people in the hospital as a chaplain.  I knew I couldn’t just walk into a stranger’s room and lead with, “So, what shall we pray for today?”  I knew I needed to make small talk, ask them why they were there, who was there with them, who they had at home, what kind of community they could expect to help them. 

It was not easy for me.  My first question was “What brought you to the hospital,” and after multiple people answered with a grin, “the ambulance,” I reworded that question.

It is not necessary for us to have a spiritual epiphany with every stranger we meet on the elevator, but I do think that engaging with people, encountering people in their moment, can open the doors where spiritual epiphanies can happen, not just for the strangers we speak to but for us.  I can’t tell you the number of times God has appeared to me as a stranger.

So this reflection this morning is one for me too.  I’m asking you to do something, but I’m reminding myself that I need to do it more, to engage more, to not be afraid to share the same breath with people even if they have just walked into your elevator and sneezed.

Amen.

 

 

COME AND SEE

Come and see, 

I have great hope

this morning,

 

after all the sun rose,

didn’t it?

 

And I got out of bed,

with a little groan,

with an “ugh”

and a sigh,

 

because this is the language

of middle-age, right?

 

And how I got out of bed,

with a roll and a twist

and a hand grabbing

my back;

 

this is the dance

of middle-age, isn’t it?

 

Come closer.

Listen carefully.

 

Because I want you to see

the hope that every day

brings to me,

 

even on the days,

when I have to mow

the lawn,

 

how even when the wet grass

clogs the mower,

 

and I speak

the language

of middle-age

 

and dance the dance,

squatting down to

scoop and toss

the wet green clumps,

aside, how even then,

 

I relish that smell

of grass, that clean smell,

that earthy smell, that

Genesis 1-third-day-

of-creation smell.

 

And when I head inside,

and grab the edge

of the countertop

and stretch out my back,

I am not just doing

some strange yoga pose,

 

I am bowing.

This is called

middle-age prayer.

 

And oh the stretch is good,

and oh the prayer is answered.

 

Outside the house finch

that fled her nest

while I mowed,

 

has returned, nestled

down into her spot

and started singing

to her eggs.

 

This is the language of birds,

the anthem of all flying creatures,

of angels even, dare I say,

of anything that speaks or sings

from soul to soul.

 

Come and see.

God is good, today.

God is good, every day.

 

God is good to me.

I woke up.

I let my spirit feast,

 

as I sat down to write

these words.

 

Come and see.

Where will you see

God today?

 

Amen.

 

 

 

SEIZE THE DAY

For weeks now, there has been this small bird singing outside my living room window.  You have never heard such a happy song.  I don’t know what makes birdsong sound happy or sad.  I just know that this bird seems thrilled with life. 

I figured that maybe she was building a nest.  I thought about my planter on the front porch.  Maybe she had found a spot in the gutter or in a nearby tree.

But I absolutely, for sure, no doubt about it, knew where she hadn’t built a nest.

There was no way she had built a nest on the porch post that had been the spot for previous house finch nests.  In the two and a half years that I have lived there, a house finch has built a nest there four times and only once has that nest been successful.  Only once have little babies birds hatched, thrived and flown away.

The other three times have been heartbreakingly depressing.

I got tired of the depressing.

So last year I put a fake bird on top of that post to deter nest building.

And it has worked.  I mean what kind of bird builds its nest on an object that has no flat surfaces, let alone builds a nest on something that resembles another bird’s head?

I’ll tell you what kind of bird—my happy little singing bird has built her nest there.

I can’t imagine a scenario where this turns out well, but still that bird sings.

Last week when Ceilia mentioned an osprey nest she had seen on vacation, I told her that where I lived in Florida, the utility companies would put spikes on top of electric poles to deter osprey from nesting.

Spikes seem a little harsh to me, but fortunately it was not every pole.  I told Ceilia there was a pole across the street from a Publix that housed an osprey nest.  Osprey will use any materials for their nest and in this case, they had used plastic Publix bags, to which Ceilia responded, “Reduce, reuse, recycle!”

One of the things that I loved every spring in Florida was watching the baby birds hatch, the Great Blue Herons, the osprey, the egrets, the Sandhill Cranes—one year we were treated to swan hatchlings also known as cygnets.  I also rejoiced over other births, like the baby alligators emerging from the reeds in the wetlands. 

I also hated that time of year because a lot of birds and gators didn’t make it.  The world—nature is an unforgiving place.  Not everything makes it.   We celebrate new life even as we know that death awaits us all.

Last week I shared lines from one of Dylan Thomas’ poems “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night” which includes the line, “Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

Another one of my favorite poems is a sonnet-like or sonnet-ish poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins entitled Spring and Fall: To a Young Child and begins with this line, “Margaret are you grieving/over goldengrove unleaving?”  The poem presents a scene where a girl, Margaret, is crying in autumn because the leaves are falling.  With lines like, “Ah! As the heart grows older/you will come to such sights colder,” the poem concludes that Margaret is not crying over the falling leaves but is crying because she has suddenly become aware that things do die and that she herself is mortal.  The final two lines read, “It is the blight man was born for/it is Margaret you mourn for.”

In today’s reading from Matthew 27:45-54, we hear lines typically reserved for Good Friday, to be read during the Passion.  We hear Jesus’ final words on the cross.  We hear the rumors of Elijah.  There is an earthquake.  Rocks split open.  The dead rise from their tombs and a centurion declares, “Truly this man was God’s son.”

Recently, when I was writing about empathy and how reading, especially reading fiction helps build our empathetic muscles, I mentioned a line I had read that basically said the most radical act of empathy the universe has ever seen happened when the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.

Jesus’ death on the cross is heartbreaking.  His torture is gut-wrenching.  His cry in today’s reading, “My God, My God, why have Your forsaken me,” reveals a sense of isolation and abandonment that I think many of us can relate to at one time or the other.

I have been known to shed a few tears during the passion play at church every Easter season.  We enter that space with Jesus.  But Jesus’ death on the cross is something truly revelatory because we shouldn’t be crying with grief, we should be crying with the knowledge that is how much God loved us.  He wanted us to know that we are worthy.  We are worthy.  We are precious in His sight.

And so He became one of us.

And death is part of life.

We cannot die if we never lived.

And Jesus lived.  He lived.  He lives.

He loved.  He laughed.  He cried.

He banged his knee on the table getting up after dinner.

He got hungry.  He knew thirst.  He had favorite foods.

He had favorite people.

Jesus showed us just how precious life is, how precious we are, the human race.

The fact that we will all die means that we must grab hold of every second and wring out the meaning and the love and the worth of each thing that happens during the day.

Someone pointed out to me last week that the poem by Dylan Thomas was in the Robin Williams movie, Dead Poet’s Society.

We also got another famous saying out of that movie … Carpe Diem.  Seize the day.

Life is precious precisely because it is finite. 

It is why just yesterday, when I turned down the alley to my house, and I saw a mama deer and two of her spotted fawns, I cried, because I was struck by the beauty of new life but at the same time already worrying that those two fawns might not make it.  I had to force myself back inside when the mama deer and the one fawn leaped over a neighbor’s fence, but the other smaller fawn was too small to make the jump.  That fawn kept looking at me and when it began to tremble, I knew I was scaring it, so I went back inside and I tried to comfort myself with this—mama deer and her fawns have been losing each other and finding each other for as long as there have been deer. 

Such is life.

And for those few moments, those precious seconds that I looked in that fawn’s eyes and it looked at me—I will hold—I will count those seconds as a precious blessing.

That little bird that sings on that very precariously perched nest, she sings because today warrants song.

Carpe diem my friends.

Amen.

 

 

MARY MAGDALENE'S TEARS (circa 1996)

“Mary, why do you weep over death?” says He.
“Your Lord is alive, is no longer dead.
Come back to the tomb, come back to Me.”

 

Roll back the stone and let me in to see

to kiss my Lord’s feet and cold, pale head.

“Mary, why do you weep over death?” says He.

 

The stone is removed, the tomb is empty.

Angels of Heaven appear in His stead.

“Come back to the tomb, come back to me.”

 

Here, Lord.  I have come as You have called me.

But You are not here, not in Your death bed.

“Mary, why do you weep over death?” says He.

 

I don’t want to mourn my Lord of the sea.

Let me wash You with my tears instead.

Come back to the tomb, come back to me.

 

“I’ve been here, Mary.  Did you not know Me?

I have been here, always.  I am not dead.

Mary, why do you weep over death?” says He.

“You came back to the tomb, back to me.”

MARY MAGDALENE

Today is the feast day for Mary Magdalene, and when I saw that, I started to think about how much I love Mary Magdalene and how often I have written about her.

In fact, I started writing about Mary Magdalene in college, almost thirty years ago.  I was taking a poetry writing class and my professor was real big on structured, formal poetry, not the free verse that I had been doing since elementary school.  My professor wanted us to concentrate on form, on meter and rhyme and though I am still a free verse poet, I did fall in love with a particular type of poem called the villanelle. 

Perhaps the most recognizable villanelle is one by Dylan Thomas—if you remember the Michelle Pfeiffer movie Dangerous Minds, or the Robin Williams movie Dead Poet’s Society, then you will recognize this poem.  Thomas writes, “Do not go gentle into that good night/old age should burn and rave at close of day/rage, rage against the dying of the light.” 

The villanelle intrigued me as a form because of the song-like quality of the meter which is iambic pentameter and the repetition of lines that form a refrain for each stanza.

And so when it came time to write my own, I chose to do a villanelle on the moment when Mary Magdalene goes back to the tomb on Easter morning.  Each stanza alternating between Mary and Jesus and beginning with these lines, “Mary, why do you weep over death, says He/Your Lord is alive, is no longer dead/Come back to the tomb, come back to me.”

And if you’re thinking, Kendra you were writing Bible-themed poetry in college, how did you not wind up in seminary immediately after graduation?  The answer is—I was close.  I was very close—this close to seminary.  But no regrets.  In the multi-verse, I’m sure there is a version of me that went to seminary right after college and is now the pastor of a Disciples of Christ church.  You lucked out with the Episcopal Church version of me.

Over and over, again and again, I have written different poems, different versions of Mary’s time in the garden on Easter morning where she greets the risen Jesus.

But one thing I have never addressed in my writing until just recently is the story of Mary Magdalene before she met Jesus.  Much like Jesus’ childhood, there is not a lot in the gospels on who Mary Magdalene was.  There is a common misconception that she was a prostitute, but the only thing we know for certain appears in Luke 8:1-3 which reads, “Soon afterwards he went on through cities and villages, proclaiming and bringing the good news of the kingdom of God. The twelve were with him, as well as some women who had been cured of evil spirits and infirmities: Mary, called Magdalene, from whom seven demons had gone out, and Joanna, the wife of Herod’s steward Chuza, and Susanna, and many others, who provided for them out of their resources.”

In other words, we know that Mary had seven demons cast out of her and we know that she and these other women, some named, some unnamed are providing financially to Jesus’ ministry.  What does this mean for Mary?  It means it’s possible she had money.  Where did she get that money?  Possibly she was a widow.  But you see how even those two questions open the door for a huge Mary story that we are never shown.

Over the years, pop culture has portrayed Mary Magdalene in this early state in different ways.  The Chosen, from what I’ve seen, seems to portray Mary Magdalene as someone who is fundamentally good but is tormented by her demons in a mostly euphemistic way—at times she would not be out of place in a horror movie today.  But this Mary has suffered trauma and as a result suffers from depression.  She also has problems with alcohol. 

In the movie Mary Magdalene, starring Joaquin Phoenix as Jesus, Mary Magdalene is shown as someone her family considers possessed because she will not conform to society’s expectations of women at that time.  She will not be forced into marriage to her brother’s friend.  Her family drags her to the water and tries to exorcise her by almost drowning her.  This traumatizes Mary further.  Only when Jesus appears and offers Mary “purpose” that gives her agency over her life, is she relieved of her mental anguish.

In earlier performances of Jesus Christ Superstar by Andrew Lloyd Weber, Mary is seen as a temptress.  And of course in books like The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown and The Book of Longings by Sue Monk Kidd, Mary Magdalene is portrayed as perhaps the wife of Jesus.

All of these suppositions make compelling stories.

But who is the true Mary Magdalene?

It was a question I attempted to answer in my new book Your Light Has Come: The Miracles of Jesus when I decided to tackle Mary Magdalene and her seven demons.

My new book is written in the same style as my two books Witnesses to the Passion of Christ and Witnesses to the Resurrection.  Using, what I call “spare verse” poetry, that is free verse that concentrates on images and the importance of each individual word, I put myself in the heads of these people and write from their point of view as they either witness Jesus’ death or His resurrection, or in the case of my new book, I write from the point of view of the people who benefited from His healing miracles.

How in the world would I do Mary’s story justice when there is so much left unsaid?

I considered leaving her out of the book completely, but then I remembered she is such a big part of the other two books, that I would be leaving her story unfinished if I didn’t try to tell the story of the worst time of her life.

Everything I write in the book about Mary Magdalene is from my imagination, anchored only by the verses in Luke 8. 

I wrote Mary as someone suffering from deep grief and deep emotional pain—so severe that she has almost shut down physically—her behavior so odd that the only word the people had at the time to describe it was possession, because she is not herself.  Her first encounter with Jesus involves Him taking a literal physical burden off her shoulders and from then on, she begins to climb out of her pit and toward the first light of hope she has seen.

The exact circumstances of Mary’s first encounter with Jesus are not what’s important.

Because we know the results.

We know she followed Him.

We know she followed Him all the way to the cross.

We know He chose to make her the first witness to His resurrection.

Peter may have been the rock on which Jesus built His church.

But Mary was the apostle to the apostles.

It doesn’t matter where Mary started. 

It only matters where she wound up.

That’s how her story becomes a universal story.  That’s why her story is so appealing to so many women in particular—I’m not saying her story can’t be important to men—but to women—we know how women were treated in Biblical times. 

We also know how important Mary was to Jesus.

That makes her worth celebrating on this feast day, for her story can be our story.

God had great things planned for Mary Magdalene.

And He has great things planned for you and me.

Amen.

 

 

 

 

IS THE END OF READING HERE?

Years ago, a teacher friend of mine invited me to speak to her fifth graders about writing.  I brought copies of my latest book Jules Verne and A Raven Named Poe and made sure every student had a copy.  And then, I read the book to them.  It was a small book.

But by the second paragraph, two boys in the front row, sitting right in front of me, put their heads down and went to sleep.

I had been a teacher myself, but had been out of the classroom for years, so when I saw them go to sleep, my first thought was, “Yep, I still got it.”

The rest of the visit was uneventful.

A week or so later, my friend sent me thank you notes from the kids.  The notes were sweet, but one in particular stood out to me.  In this note, a boy had included an illustration of one of the scenes in my book.  It was just stick figures, but I smiled when I saw it.  He had illustrated the scene just as I had originally imagined it.

Think about that for a second.

Because this is why reading and writing, the connection between author and reader is magical.

I had to first visualize the scene in my head.  Then I had to find words to describe it.  Then I put those words to paper.  The boy then read those words.  He visualized the scene in his head.  Then he drew that scene on paper.

It’s telepathy.  It’s magic.

More importantly, it shows how reading novels and stories strengthens our ability to empathize with others.  A good book puts us in the shoes of others.

Recently The Atlantic had an article entitled The End of Reading Is Here.  It asserted that we are officially living in a post-literate society.  It argues that while we are still reading and reading many words every day, that reading is confined to short excerpts, think of Instagram or Twitter/X or the text messages we receive all throughout the day.  Or maybe you are like me and leave the closed captioning on the TV screen constantly.  We are reading. 

What we are reading has changed.

Only 38% of people surveyed in 2022 read a novel or a short story.  Another survey said that only 16% of people report that they read for pleasure.

When I was teaching roughly fifteen years ago, I read a novel a quarter with my eighth graders.  We read as a class and with a book on tape.  I generally chose books that I knew would capture the imagination of even the most reluctant reader, mystery books, comedies etc.  And virtually every year, I would have students come up to me and tell me that that was the first book they had ever read.

My guess is that number would be much larger these days.

So what are the consequences when a society stops reading books, especially novels?

I would argue that the chief consequence is that we become a society that is far less empathetic, a society that can no longer identify with people who are different than them, a society where we can’t imagine ourselves in the same situation and so we become unsympathetic.  We turn away from the suffering of others.

Jesus addresses this lack of empathy in today’s reading from Matthew 25:31-46.  He says, “'Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me … for I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not give me clothing, sick and in prison and you did not visit me.'”

Jesus asks His disciples to see Him, to see Jesus in the face of those that society ignores, the hungry, the stranger, the prisoner.

To be able to see Jesus in everyone is the height of an empathetic relationship.

I was reading elsewhere this week that the “incarnation itself is God’s act of radical empathy.”

If you want to know how God values empathy, look no further than Jesus.

Jesus understands humanity because He is human.

He understands suffering because He himself suffered.

He understands grief because He himself grieved.

He understands hunger because He himself hungered.

He understands pain and loneliness and all the ways that human beings suffer because He himself lived and died as a human being.

So, what good books have you read so far this year?  May I recommend Canticle by Janet Rich Edwards and Mad Mabel by Sally Hepworth and The Children by Melissa Albert.

Strengthen your empathy muscle today.  Feed it with the voices of people different from you.

Read a book.

Amen.

 

GIVE FREELY, LOVE UNCONDITIONALLY

Many years ago, a friend of mine, who was a guidance counselor at the time, gave a survey on bullying to our students.

One of the questions, an obvious question, was whether or not they had ever bullied someone, and if so why?

One of the students answered that yes, he had bullied kids and the reason he gave was one word … angerment.

Yes, you are correct “angerment” is not a word.

And yet this new word seemed perfect.  Anger is something you feel.  Angerment is something you have.  It is something you own.  It is a part of you, to the bone.

There are still days, decades later, where I will text my friend and tell her, “I have angerment.”

In our readings over the past few weeks, including today’s reading from Matthew, we see a Jesus that has some angerment.

And it may be a side of Jesus that makes us uncomfortable.  It’s not a side we’re used to seeing.  Recently I have been watching various episodes of The Chosen.  I am in the middle of writing my new book and I want to make sure that my stories, my interpretations of Jesus’s miracles, specifically, are different than other interpretations.  I don’t want to be accused of copying.

But what amazes me as I watch The Chosen is just how loveable Jesus is.  The people of the time expected the Messiah to be a soldier, a King David, to lead them into battle.  But the Jesus we see in The Chosen is … quite frankly … and I mean this respectfully, a big old Teddy Bear.  He is someone you want to be embraced by.  He is someone you want to hear tell you how much God loves you.

In the episode where He meets the woman at the well, He is almost pleading, begging her to believe Him.  He has tears in His eyes.  It’s not that He needs her to believe for His sake.  It’s that He wants her to believe for her sake, because He knows how much she needs this, to know that God is watching over her, that God sees her.

But the Jesus who says in today’s reading, “You brood of vipers,” is a Jesus with angerment, not bullying angerment, but a righteous anger.  Between Matthew 23, today’s reading, and Mathew 26 where Jesus is betrayed and arrested, Jesus makes many comments about the end times, about the signs of the times, and final judgement. 

Jesus’s words in today’s reading are harsh.  They are not gentle.  They are not kind.  Jesus is running out of time.  And it forces Him to get real so to speak.

“For you are like whitewashed tombs, which on the outside look beautiful, but inside they are full of the bones of the dead and of all kinds of filth,” Jesus says. 

These are words that speak to us even today. 

In The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde, which you may have read in high school, but is definitely required reading if you are an English major in college, a man, Dorian Gray, sells his soul for eternal youth.  A painted portrait of him, hidden in the attic does all the aging for him.  But the story is more than that.  Given a life where consequences are meaningless, Dorian Gray engages in some truly awful behavior.  It is not just that the picture shows his true physical age, it also shows the monster within him, the evil that he has done.

Dorian Gray is Jesus’s “whitewashed tomb” and his portrait is what is filled “with all kinds of filth.”

As I have said many times, it is so easy these days to become cynical about the state of our world.

But even as I was writing this, right after I finished the Dorian Gray sentence above, there was a knock on the door. 

It was the little girl, the one who has been knocking on my door from the time I first moved here, trying to sell me things, but who I have not seen in a very long time.  Last night, she had books and she wanted to know if I wanted them for the Little Free Library, but here’s the thing … she wanted money for them.

And while I was good with giving the kids money for things they made like bracelets and other artistic things, I knew I had to draw the line with books.  That’s not the purpose of the Little Free Library.

So, I told her I would trade her, books for books.

She didn’t seem thrilled by my offer.  She hemmed and hawed about it for a minute but she had a boy with her who was her age or maybe younger and who I hadn’t seen before.

And he looked at her and said, “Yeah, let’s take the books.”

So I asked them what kind of books they liked and while they put their donations in the library, I went looking through my shelves.

I wound up giving them Diary of a Wimpy Kid and Captain Underpants of course and some books based on Disney Pixar movies and some other graphic novels that I thought they might like.

The boy called them picture books but because I had called them graphic novels, the little girl corrected him. 

She had already realized that calling them graphic novels elevates them.  They’re not little kids books.

For the past several weeks, I have been talking about our reading where Jesus warns people not to put stumbling blocks in front of the children.  Now I have taken that as to say we should not put stumbling blocks in front of any of God’s children and we are all God’s children.

But I don’t want to take away from the fact that Jesus consistently shows how much He values children, our little ones.

Earlier yesterday, I had been so cranky.  I had such angerment.  I was so frustrated with people behaving badly. 

I have no idea what those kids will do with those books.  Maybe someone will tell them they can get money from Half Price Books if they take them there.  Maybe the books will wind up discarded in their yard.  Or maybe they’ll find a space on a bookshelf.  Maybe they’ll be treasured.

But what happens to the books is not the point.  Did you see how quickly wondering like that can turn cynical?

The point is … the joy is … in the giving.

And so maybe the answer to angerment is simply this … give freely.  Whatever is most precious to you, share it with someone else.  Do it freely and unconditionally and without expectation of return.  After all this is exactly what Jesus did.

And remember this which I said so often back in the spring.

Love God.

Love your neighbor without exception.

Amen.