Always a song

I am not a fan of country music. When we spent the weekend in Nashville, we heard a lot of it around the indoor pool. It is fascinating the things that the country songwriters write about. Broken hearts, broken cars, trailer parks, dogs. Put to music, the woes of various down and outers become danceable and upbeat.  Maybe this incongruity is what makes one a fan of the genre. The Psalms in the Bible are like that. They range from lofty and lovely hymns of praise to gritty, desperate cries for help. The writers tell tales of sublime peace, the Lord is my Shepherd, as well as indescribable suffering, just one Psalm before: They pierced My hands and feet. The small print under many Psalms give instruction to the Chief Musician, set to the tune of a certain well known melody of the day. We still get to do that. We can put to words the stories of our own day, the good and the not so good, the gritty and the sweet. We can put the words to music, and sing to God as David did, rejoicing or crying. We can lift up our voice and shout a word of praise or panic. In a song, they come to the same place; where the melody takes away the hurt and smooths out the rough edges. We might just find our feet tapping and our hands clapping in spite of ourselves.

Fingerprints

I love visiting old places. I try to picture what the place looked like when it was new, with the people who lived there dressed in the garb of the day, doing what people did then. I can see beyond the age and see the hands that rocked the cradle, carried the candle stand, put the hand sewn quilts on the bed. I like to think there might still be fingerprints. When we visited the Lincoln Memorial last weekend, I wonder if any particles of DNA of all the millions of people that have visited that place, marched on the Mall, spoke from the steps, has found a home there. Is there a dried drop of sweat from Martin Luther King Jr.'s brow hidden in the cracks of marble? Is there a tiny bit of hair blown off JFK's head secreted away under the pillars? Did a part of me stay there, somehow, when I touched the smooth walls and wondered these things? As we stride through our lives, meeting the past at almost every turn, are we able to leave our fingerprints on the places we went, the people we touched? When we fold our hands at day's end, can we look at them and know that we will be remembered? Can we make sure that what we touched, we handled with care? Leave your love everywhere, at the cradle, the quilt and every heart you hold.

One at a time

I imagine God in Heaven, handing out our days one at a time, like lollipops. We like to think we can grab a whole handful, store them away in some secret place, feeling powerful and eternal. But He only gives out one at a time, measuring the same 24 hours to us all. Days of sun and rain, heat and cold. Days that start bright and turn cloudy, tornado days, tsunami days. Days when babies are born, days when they die before they take their first breath. Days that start cloudy and end sunny, the promotion at work, the wedding bells. He hands one gently to us, we grab it and run away, never thanking Him for the gift. We go back for more before the time, and pout and cry because we don't get what we want. Days are not for hoarding, they are for living. Days are for sharing, not saving. What we gave up one day we get restored the next, what cost us one day rewards us the next. Days are for do-overs, forgiving, persevering. It would be nice, maybe, to know at the beginning how many days we get over a lifetime. It would still be hard when you knew you were running out of them. I imagine God, handing out our days, and I stand humbly before Him, hoping for tomorrow.

Soapbox

I read lots of Facebook posts and blogs that talk about friends and family that have cancer. There is a common theme...whenever the chemo stops working or the cancer goes crazy, the person is referenced as "losing the fight". If the person chooses to stop treatment, they "gave up". I beg to differ. Cancer and mental illness seem to be the two diseases that place the burden of healing on the person with the disease. No one expects a person with diabetes to grow a new pancreas, or a person in kidney failure on dialysis to grow a new kidney, but someone with cancer is supposed to get well somehow, even when the cancer has spread to every organ in their body. I wonder why this is. It puts a terrible burden on the person, because they feel that they have to do every single thing the oncologist suggests in order to "win" and live. They forget that living with cancer can mean living intentionally, not merely sitting in a big chair for hours at a time, taking toxic chemicals intravenously that may not have any effect at all on the cancer but a major effect on the person's ability to feel good. Living with cancer can mean going to work, kissing your husband, and eating ice cream. If someone you love finds out they have cancer, be kind. Let them really live their best life, whatever that might look like.

Fraud Protection

I have a credit card from Chase. It has a healthy credit limit on it and is the only credit card I carry. I feel safe with it, because no matter what may happen, I can use it to get what I need if I get into a tough situation. A few weeks ago, I was in Virginia visiting my daughter. I thought nothing of using the card to pay for some meals out, and gas for her car. One day, we loaded up the shopping cart with $200 worth of groceries, my treat, but when I went to use the card it was denied. This has never happened to me before. I was incredulous. I felt suddenly bereft and humiliated. Turns out that Chase doesn't like fraud, and thought maybe my card had been stolen since the purchases were out of state, so they de-authorized it. I was thinking about that today, and thought that is how many people think about God. They think a belief in "someone up there or something out there" keeps them safe, that they can use it to get what they need if they get in a tough situation, like my credit card. What they don't realize is that this kind of belief is like fraud, because it isn't attached to the living God. He owns the card, so to speak, but they don't communicate with Him, so, when they need to use it, it doesn't work. It took me 15 minutes of revealing very private information to convince Chase that I was really who I was supposed to be before they re-activated my card. It is the opposite with God. He knows us, we need to know who He is. The best life is having an activated faith in the God who loves us, and who is always with us, to keep us safe.