Bear v. Man

This past April a TikTok video emerged asking seven women a very interesting question.  If they were alone, walking in the woods, would they rather come across a bear or a man they didn’t know.  All but one of the women chose the bear.

The video went viral with a majority of women once again choosing the bear, saying things like if the bear attacked them, no one would ask them if they had led the bear on.  Another woman who chose the bear said at least she didn’t have to guess the bears intentions.

Right now, you’re probably asking yourself what you would choose, so I just want a take a moment to point out something from today’s reading from Proverbs 17:1-20, specifically verse 12 which reads, “Better to meet a she-bear robbed of its cubs than to confront a fool immersed in folly.”

Even the Bible chooses the bear.

The man or bear scenario though is yet another example in this world of how we react and respond to fearful events.  We are a society that is steeped in fear.  I get alerts from my Ring doorbell app throughout the day, mostly from neighbors in a five mile radius reporting various crimes.

We live, these days, seemingly in a constant state of anxiety.

I woke up from a nap the other day in the middle of a panic attack.  My heart was racing.  I was gasping for breath.  I admit, it’s possible I had been experiencing sleep apnea and woke up in a panic because my brain was suddenly freaking out from the lack of oxygen.

But as I lay there, trying to calm down, taking deeper more meaningful breaths, I realized that sleep apnea aside, waking up in a panic might be a natural response for me given all that has happened to me so far this year.

Since January, I have bought a house, moved, discovered I needed surgery for the first time, and most recently had someone fire a gun outside my living room window.  Whether it’s something positive like buying a house or negative like a shooting, anxiety is a normal response.

My surgery is now roughly a week a way and if you want to know if I’m afraid, my answer right now is I’m not as afraid as you would think, mostly because the surgery has to be done—I don’t have a choice and so therefore whatever happens … happens—I have very little control.  I am most worried about how my crazy immune system will respond to the surgery and I am hoping that the stress dose of prednisone they are supposed to give me will help with that.

Among the things I’m thinking about regarding the surgery, I am thinking about being under general anesthesia.  I have had minor procedures done over the years requiring light anesthesia, ranging from having my wisdom teeth out twenty years ago to have an endoscopic ultrasound done just this past December.  There is always a moment, a delayed reaction on my part, right before the drugs start working, the nitrous oxide or the propofol where my brain understands that the switch has been flipped, that something is happening and I’m about to lose consciousness and that moment is terrifying to me, every time, for those few seconds before darkness hits and the next thing I know I’m awake in recovery.

I have only ever been under general anesthesia once.  I was five years old and had broken my arm.  They had to put me under so they could set the break.  I remember everything about that day so clearly.  I remember trying to convince the doctors and nurses that I could fall asleep on my own that I didn’t need to be put out.  I remember that the worse pain was from the IV.  I remember them showing me my xrays before I went under.  I remember dreaming that Winnie the Pooh was operating on me.  Somehow that wasn’t a nightmare.  It was oddly comforting.

And I remember waking up in a sunlit room from what I, in my short life to that point, thought was the best sleep I had ever had.  There was a nurse at a desk in the corner working on paperwork.  I didn’t want her to know that I was awake.  I wanted more of that sleep so I closed my eyes and tried to sleep again, but I couldn’t so this time, I opened my eyes for real and looked at the nurse.  She must have known something had changed, because she looked up almost immediately and when she saw I was awake, she gave me the biggest smile you have ever seen and by that I mean that I have never had someone look at me that way since.  It was a smile of pure joy and divine love.

At that moment, I believed she was an angel.

I still believe she was an angel.

As a chaplain, I have spent a lot of time with people in the ICU, recovering from various surgeries both minor and otherwise.  And I know that God is there.

I know.

Period.

And now that I will be experiencing this from the other side of the hospital bed so to speak, I need to remind myself of that.

That God is there.

That angels are present.

That there is nothing to fear.

That love drives out all fear because light drives out all darkness.

A couple of days ago, I was at the grocery store, the one with the armed guards.  Remember what I have said before about shopping carts—they’re all bad, we are all victims—and sure enough the first cart I chose had locked wheels.  You couldn’t even move it but the next cart was remarkably smooth.

As I was leaving, I was prepared to drop the cart off before exiting—I only had one bag to carry—when I saw an old man approaching the cart with the locked wheels.  He put his bag in the cart and his cane and sure enough when he started to push the cart, it wouldn’t move at all.

I knew right then that I would give him my cart and headed his way.  He saw me coming and he knew I was bringing him my cart.

He took out his cane and bag from the first cart and waited for me.

“You need a cart?” I asked him.  “This one will do you good.  You have a nice day.”

You see sometimes the strange man is preferable to the bear.

Because, again from our reading from Proverbs today, this time from verse 17, “a friend loves at all times.”

Do not ever be afraid to reach out in love.

Love is bigger than fear.

Amen.

 

If You Build It

I’ve decided that after I recover from my surgery in a couple of weeks, I want to build a prayer labyrinth in my backyard.  My backyard is small and the grass is already spotty.  It is filled with chunks of concrete, rocks, trash and years of neglect both in its time as a vacant lot and also during construction of my house. 

I won’t give up on it, but with a church across the street and google map rumors that a church may have also been on this property at some point, I want to make sure the ground around here is filled with spiritual life.  I want to saturate it with something holy. 

One of the things I miss the most about Florida is walking the prayer labyrinth at my friend Laura’s church weekly for years.  And while there are labyrinths a short drive from where I live now, I have, for the first time, my own yard and therefore the ability to make this land whatever I want.  I want it to be a place you take off your shoes.  I want this to be holy ground.

That’s the backyard.

In the front yard, I want to fulfill another dream and put in a Little Free Library.  The thing I miss most about being a Language Arts teacher is providing books for kids to read, curating a classroom library filled with books so loved their pages were falling out.

There are children in my new neighborhood.  They have in the past been fascinated with my house—I’m not sure why except maybe it’s the newness of it or the mystery of whoever lives there.  They love my Ring doorbell.  And they are like little detectives searching through my mailbox for evidence that yes, someone lives here.  They get a kick out of ringing the doorbell or knocking on the door and running.  They’re very fast; their giggles are still in the air long after they vanished down the street.

Summer is coming fast, and I don’t know what these kids will be doing, but I want them to know that in my front yard there is a magical place that is never empty of books.

A labyrinth and a library—these are things I want to do and yet, for a while this past Saturday afternoon, I questioned if building either was wise.

I was sitting in the recliner with Pippin on my lap, watching a Yankees game, when out of nowhere there was large thunderclap outside the window.  The window shook.  The wall shook and flash of a white shirt ran past the window, barely visible with my curtain blocking most of the view.

Pippin fled from my lap as I leaped from the chair.  I was halfway to the window when I realized that the sound I heard was a gunshot and that running to the window might not be the best move.

I have heard gunshots before in real life—not just on TV, but up until this past Saturday, the only gunfire I had ever heard was from a hunting rifle.  I had never heard a handgun up close.

A handgun does not sound like a rifle.

I would describe a rifle as like a thundercrack.

A handgun is more like a thunderclap.

You may wonder what the difference is and all I can say is that if you heard them both, you would know.

For all the time that gunfire is compared to the sound of firecrackers, I can tell you that a handgun does not sound at all like a firecracker.

And if you remember my sermon from a few weeks ago, a handgun definitely doesn’t sound like oranges falling from a tree into the bed of a truck.

This gunshot was so close, I thought the house had been hit and when enough time had passed, when I had heard the running footsteps fade and the sound of screeching tires as the person peeled away in a car, I went outside to check on my house.

The house was fine so far as I could tell.

The story is that apparently this past Saturday a group of teenage boys had gathered just a few houses down from me, near where that car had hit the house a couple of weekends ago.  Words were exchanged and shots fired, including the one that I heard by my living room window.

When I walked outside to check on the house, once again the church across the street was worshipping, but this time instead of emptying at the sound of a car crashing, there were only two men standing out front to check on the gunfire.

A teenage boy walked down the middle of the street past us and one of the churchgoers asked him if he was okay.

The boy didn’t even look his way, but mumbled, “yeah.”

The churchgoer continued.  “Because if someone is hurt, we have nurses inside.”

“Nah,” the boy said and continued on.

Though I had not been the target of the gunfire, I had almost been caught in the crossfire and this made me wonder for a moment if building a prayer labyrinth in my backyard was a good move, if even being outside sitting on my back patio was a good move, if there was a chance I could be shot.

I wondered these things, but only for a moment because then I decided that building a labyrinth, installing a Little Free Library—doing these things was more important than ever.  My goal had been to saturate this land with holiness and after the shooting on Saturday, I realized this goal was more important now than ever.

There are only a few short years separating the children who rang my doorbell and ran and the boys who shot at each other on Saturday.

What happened in those years to turn laughter into fear?

I don’t know and I don’t have answers on how to fix something that has been ailing society for a long time now.

All I know is what I can do in my little patch of earth.

And that is saturate the ground with divine love and grace.

In today’s reading from Matthew 11:16-24, Jesus is addressing the people and chastising them for ignoring important signs.  He says, “But to what will I compare this generation?  It is like children sitting in the marketplaces and calling to one another, ‘We played the flute for you, and you did not dance; we wailed, and you did not mourn.’”

Woe to whoever ignores what is right in front of them, who turns away from the children when they are laughing or when they are crying.

Woe to all of us who turn away when Jesus comes knocking.

Jesus was knocking this past Saturday. 

Where you might ask?

I saw Him, in those two churchgoers offering comfort and healing to the boy walking down the street.

I saw Him, in their calm presence.

And I felt Him stir with my own spirit.

This ground is Holy Ground.

Amen.

Even in Australia

This past Monday, I was busy trying to shove a cardboard box into the closet when the bifold door came loose and fell on me.  Fortunately, my dad was just outside putting together a toolshed for me and I was able to holler for him to help me.  I managed to escape the falling door with only a scraped arm and bruise.

Sometime later, after my dad had tried, in a futile attempt, to put the door back into place, he turned to me and said, “When the ladies from church were over the other day blessing the house, did they bless this closet?”

“Well,” I said, “the areas around the closet.”

“Maybe you want to call them back,” my dad suggested.

I have been having some bad days recently, whether it’s closet doors falling on me or the brand new air handler in my house that won’t blow air (anyone who knows me, knows that I am cursed with never having consistently working air conditioning)—whether it’s those things, or the recent discovery that I need surgery—it’s been a rough couple of weeks.

In today’s reading from Matthew 8:28-34 we learn about someone else having a bad day.

In particular, a pig farmer who was having a really bad day.

Maybe he had a feeling it was going to be a bad day as soon as he woke up that morning.

Maybe he had this twinge in his back.

Maybe he had tossed and turned all night.

Maybe all he wanted to do was to go back to bed.

But he was a pig farmer and the pigs needed to be fed.

So he went outside, slopped the pigs and stood there for a moment watching the early morning sun.  He was still half asleep and so maybe he didn’t notice the commotion at first, but then he saw it … a stranger was passing through and the two demoniacs had left the tomb and were yelling at the stranger.

“I knew I should have stayed in bed,” the pig farmer said to himself.  This wasn’t going to end well.

The stranger and the demoniacs spoke.  The pig farmer couldn’t hear what they said, but the next he knew his pigs were going crazy, screaming.  Suddenly, they took off running to the cliff. 

“No!” the pig farmer shouted, sprinting after them.

But he was too late.

The pigs had jumped off the cliff.

They were all dead now at the bottom of the ravine.

The pig farmer sighed.  “I definitely should have stayed in bed,” he said.

I remember some years ago in a Bible study that this was what bothered my friend Lorraine about the story of Jesus and the demoniacs and the herd of pigs—she was so troubled about the pigs.  What had they done?  This was the livelihood of the farmer—now gone.  No wonder the villagers drove Jesus out.

When I was a kid, one of my favorite books was called “Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day.”  I think you can guess what the book was about.

Alexander is having a very bad day.  He wakes up with gum his hair.  His sweater falls into the sink with the water running.  His siblings all find toys in their cereal boxes.  Alexander finds cereal.  Throughout the day, one thing after another goes wrong for him and periodically, Alexander makes the declaration that he would be better off in Australia.

Which now that I think about it, may explain my fascination with Australia as a child.

But at the very end of the book, when Alexander tells his mother about his terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day, she replies with, perhaps, some frustrating advice.  “Some days are like that,” she says, “even in Australia.”

We all have bad days.  None of us are immune.

You know how it seems that every time you go to the grocery store, you get the one bad cart?  That’s what you think, right, every time—you are the unlucky one.

But as it turns out, everyone gets the bad cart.  They’re all bad.  We’re not a victim; we’re human.

There is no immunity, no vaccination against bad days.  We all have them.

But while there may not be immunity to bad days, there is treatment—something to relieve the symptoms. 

In our other reading for today from Isaiah 4:2-6, we learn that after all the horribleness the Israelites have endured, God “will create over the whole site of Mount Zion and over its places of assembly a cloud by day and smoke and the shining of a flaming fire by night. Indeed over all the glory there will be a canopy. It will serve as a pavilion, a shade by day from the heat, and a refuge and a shelter from the storm and rain.”

God is with us.

If we look at the verses from Isaiah as a metaphor for our journey, our existence, belief in God does not mean the day won’t hot or there won’t be storms and rain—belief in God means that He will be our shade and refuge from the sun, from the storm.

He will walk with us.

He will sit with us.

He will comfort us.

So that we know we are not alone, no matter where we are—even Australia.

Amen.

Trouble Those Waters

This past Sunday, just as I sat down to watch the Yankees game, a car came speeding down the street, lost control and ran into a house on the corner, less than a block away from me.

When I went outside to see what had happened, I noticed that every single parishioner at the church across the street—the House of God—had spilled out into the street and at least half of them were running down the street to the crash site.

I heard someone say that so and so was a nurse and someone else got on the phone to call 911.  I do think it’s interesting that every single person from the church that was running to the accident—was a woman.

The men stayed behind.

And so I found myself privy to this otherworldly sight of all these women in their Sunday best, beautiful dresses, some white, most colorful, hair done up in wraps or set with hats, racing down the street and descending on the car to help whoever was inside.

Yesterday, at a trip to the doctor to address some odd bleeding I have been having, I was told that that I had a very large cervical polyp and that while she didn’t think it looked obviously like cancer, she would do a biopsy and regardless of the outcome, the polyp would eventually need to be surgically removed.

I share this story for two reasons.  One, I share it as a lesson for everyone.  I had been having symptoms for over a year before I went to the doctor.  Don’t do that.  Ultimately, we know our bodies best and when something strange and out of the ordinary begins to happen, we should get it checked out.

Secondly, I share this story because as I was laying there in the doctor’s office, as the doctor and her nurse seemingly asked me every ten seconds if I was okay, until finally I answered, “I’m still conscious”—as I lay there processing what was happening, I kept thinking one thing … why?

Dear God, why?

Haven’t I dealt with enough in my life?

Why?

Honestly, this is a question that we all ask ourselves when something bad happens.  We try not to feel sorry for ourselves but sometimes—my goodness—sometimes it’s just so overwhelming.

And so I turn to Job in our reading today from Job 23:1-12.  Job, of course, is our poster child for suffering.  No one in the Old Testament suffers more and deserves it less.  That is the point of Job.  He had everything.  He was good and faithful and then he loses it all, his wealth, his children, his health.

And in today’s reading, we see Job expressing feelings I think we have all had.  He says, “If I go forward, he is not there; or backward, I cannot perceive him; on the left he hides, and I cannot behold him; I turn to the right, but I cannot see him.”

It’s heartbreaking, but something even Mother Theresa experienced for a good portion of her life—not being able to feel God’s presence.  Even if we have faith that He is there, we cannot feel Him.  We cannot see Him.

It is such a common experience for us that it’s the entire point of one of our most beloved poems/prayers “Footprints in the Sand.”

And it is why, as I have said before, we need to make a habit of asking daily where we saw God that day.

One of the first things I did when I got home from the doctor’s was to start sending out texts to my prayer warriors, asking for prayer.  Sometimes our faith is like sediment in a puddle, it settles and seemingly disappears blending into the ground and sometimes when we really need that faith, we have to stir up that water, release that faith, trouble those waters.  Imagine each nearly microscopic piece of sand, of dirt, of rock and clay, imagine millions of those, now swirling like stars in the Milky Way, holding you up—the Angels of God.

That’s what asking others to pray for us does.  It helps us feel embraced by God’s love. 

On Sunday, when I watched all those church ladies racing to the crash site, I couldn’t help but think that I was watching God’s angels respond in real time.  Me, I took a couple of extra seconds, before I walked outside to check to see what had happened, but those women, responded immediately.

And that is how God responds—immediately.

You will never be alone.

Amen.