Ewwww...Look What the Warmth Dragged In!

A bright, sunny January 31 and I’m outside walking, clad only in a long sleeved shirt and hooded sweatshirt (well, pants and shoes of course – they don’t have to watch me that closely yet!!). Who would have thunk it. I don’t remember many winter’s day walks such as this before. I can just hear Al Gore – “See! I told you so!” (I recently assisted my brother with his doctoral dissertation work; the help involved spending some time with former Vice President and now environmental activist Al Gore’s book, Our Choice – A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis. Mr. Gore’s position is that our lack of winter snow cover and 50+ degrees instead of a more usual 5 at this time of year constitutes a global warming crisis, but I’ll leave that for a discussion another day.

Crisis or no, I thoroughly enjoyed my walk. Such unexpected warmth was truly an unexpected pleasure, until I began to see what the bright sunlight and its heat had uncovered: garbage, and a lot of it. Yesterday was trash pickup day and a lot of rubbish was apparently scattered hither and yon by the wind, which only added to the gunk piles that were revealed by the retreat of the little snow we did have. I decided to trudge on back to my house, get a couple of trash bags and do a good deed for my neighborhood while I did a good deed for my body. None of this refuse was mine, and I didn’t have plastic gloves, but the dreck was mucking up my space and that made it mine.

I don’t normally go into other people’s yards, (especially since I seemed to have enough trash in my own yard and in my own path) but there was plenty to pick up anyway: an old corn stalk that adorned someone’s lamppost last fall, a soggy Fruit Loops box, unidentifiable squishes of old newspaper, scrunched beer cans, smashed water bottles, a bag of dog poop (I think – I didn’t actually stick my nose in) tied at the end or I wouldn’t have picked it up, and even a disgusting mush of canned cranberry sauce, fork left sticking out of it where the non-eater wisely gave up. (OK, truth time: I did NOT pick up this last gross mess as I didn’t have gloves and it was just too nice a day to risk triggering my gag reflux. Sorry. If it’s still pseudo-spring tomorrow maybe I’ll glove up and take care of it. Or not.) As it was, when I returned home I washed my hands and sanitized. Twice.

Sadly, this won’t be the last time someone will have to pick up the slop from the neighborhood’s rubbish bins. In a while, it will just have to be done again; it’s just the way it is. We’re messy people, and if not me, who should pick it up? It’s my subdivision, my home; I don’t want to live in a garbage dump.

I don’t want my life to be a garbage dump, either, and in a way, unexpected heat can turn up unexpected, or previously buried garbage in my often messy life. The warm winds of disappointment blow in, turning up depression and sadness. A friend’s snub, a family member’s uncaring action causes bitterness to grow. Financial downturns sometimes reveal worry and fear. A serious medical diagnosis can foster pain and apprehension. If those things are left lying there, un-dealt-with, I might soon find myself living in that dump. It’s really difficult to pick it up the gunk myself, though, and I need help. Thankfully, Jesus is in the trash pickup business. He’s got lots of bags, doesn’t need gloves and doesn’t care what kind of mess it is. It doesn’t matter to Him that the mess isn’t even His.

We do need to ask for His help in the clean-up, though. And while He saves us once-and-for-all, this side of heaven we’ll always have trash, always be dealing with garbage. We have to be vigilant because when we think we have it all picked up, whoosh – along comes a gusty blast of adversity and there’s the debris again. Good thing for me Jesus doesn’t get tired. Or grossed out. Not even over mushed canned cranberry sauce with the forking sticking out.

"If we confess our sins, He is faithful and rightous to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness." I John 1:9

FYI, BFF, LOL, ROTFL, BTW, TGIF, IDK , TTYL, THX—all common examples of a modern day foreign language of sorts. And whether you‘re fluent in it or not, you’re probably at least a little familiar with the abbreviated lingo.

But for the sake of the as yet uninitiated, here’s a quick translation: “FYI (for your information), BFF (best friend forever), LOL (laughing out loud), ROTFL (rolling on the floor laughing), BTW (by the way), TGIF (thank goodness it’s Friday), IDK (I don’t know), TTYL (talk to you later) and THX (thanks).“ Due to the popularity of text messaging, Facebook, Twitter and chat rooms, these acronyms (and 1,344 others I found on an online list) emerged “tailored to the immediacy and compactness of these new communication media.” This new-speak is quick, hip and you can say a lot with minimal effort.

Oh, and one I forgot—my favorite, really: LYSM. Original to the Larsons via my clever oldest daughter, we have begun employing it frequently when we text or email one another: love you so much. A sentiment such as this bears repeating over...and over...and over again. It reminds us that we are important to one another, we care for one another and we so need one another.

Simply texting or typing four letters doesn’t necessarily mean a whole lot, though. You have to mean it. You have to do it. You have to show it. It might involve remembering something someone else finds important, purposing to be thoughtful or doing something for another you’d rather not do—even if the recipient appears unworthy of it. LYSM requires action with no strings attached.

While I’m pretty sure those letters were not engraved on Christ’s cross, they might well have been. Jesus was God and he was man. Knowing completely what lay ahead of Him on that cross, He couldn’t help but not want it to be so. “My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death,” He said in the Garden of Gethsemane. “...Going a little farther, He fell with his face to the ground and prayed, ‘My Father, if it is possible, may this cup be taken from me. Yet not as I will, but as you will.’” (Matthew 26:39, 39b) Because of His great and all-encompassing love for us, He went ahead and submitted to His Father’s will—the greatest show of love in action ever shown.

For Jesus, LYSM meant loving so much that He died and rose again for people who didn’t love Him, didn’t want Him and certainly didn’t deserve Him. This sort of love is difficult to understand and even harder to emulate. But that’s the Christ follower’s task, as Jesus Himself instructed in Luke 6:40 - “students are not above their teacher, but all who are fully trained will be like their teacher.” We are to give when we’d rather keep, be patient when patience is tried, be kind when mean is easier—even when it seems to be completely unwarranted. That’s LYSM, in any language.

Because I Said So

We were very young. Babies, really. But on January 8, 1972 Barbara Jean Halliday married Robert Edward Larson and so began a union that celebrates its 40th anniversary this year.

My parents, and a lot of other people if the truth be told, thought that we, at 19 and 21 years of age, were really too young to make a decision such as this. But who’s going to tell a woman two months shy of 20 that she doesn’t know her own mind?

I’d been raised by two “because I said so” kind of people who stressed obedience, honesty, integrity and doing what you said you’d do. So, on that day four decades ago when I said “I do,” I did. And fortunately, Bob did, too. In this era of 72-day marriages and quickie divorces, our marriage endures today.

Though life hasn’t been a picnic every single day, we have had plenty of them: three beautiful daughters, a great son-in-law, two precious grandsons, opportunities to travel, wonderful homes—and the blessings go on. Along the way there have also been lots of ants at those picnics...and rain-outs...and stormy days when no one was even dreaming of a picnic.

Several years ago a young friend was preparing for her own wedding. She blissfully related to me that she and her beloved had never had even an inkling of an argument and surely never, ever would. Sadly, that marriage ended in divorce. Harsh words do come. Misunderstandings happen. We are all born with a sin nature, and boy, do we let it show! We are selfish. We want our own way. We want what we want when we want it.

People change, too. Over the course of a relationship some folks become more assertive. Some grow weary, some depressed. Some develop new interests their partner doesn’t share. Many find that pesky number on the scale creeping ever upward while their wardrobe starts to shrink (!). In the late 90’s I was showing a woman around our home. Perplexed, she scrutinized the photo of two grinning newlyweds displayed above our bed. “Who are these people?” she asked. Really? We’d “matured” so much she couldn’t tell?

Sometimes we can’t tell, either. It’s a wonder God can. But He promises to always love us, always care for us and always be there for us, no matter what we do, no matter how we act, no matter how we change. His is a “Because I said so” kind of love and God can not lie. His word is gold. In John 10:27-30, Jesus, Who we know is also God, says, “My sheep listen to my voice; I know them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish; no one will snatch them out of my hand. My Father, who has given them to me, is greater than all; no one can snatch them out of my Father’s hand. I and the Father are one.”

God promised me forever. Because of that, and with His help, Bob & I could make promises, too: ‘”until death do us part.” After all, he, and I, said so.

In the Beginning...

Nana, why is the sky blue?”

Hmmmm, I thought. What exactly did I learn about that, way back when? Not knowing what else to say, I replied in my very best “I-know- what-I’m-talking-about” Grandma voice: “Well, Bobby, God just made it like that.”

The website Faqkids.com gets a little more “scientific”. “White sunlight is really a lot of different colors of light mixed together. Some colors of light travel through air and dust better than others. Red goes a long, long way. But blue light gets bounced around a lot. Our blue sky is blue light that has been bounced out of sunlight by gazillions of molecules of air.”

Same thing, really. Maybe just a little more “wordy.”

Many years ago, referring to Genesis 1:1, my Wisconsin pastor said that if you believed that first verse of the Bible then you could believe the rest of Scripture. “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth,” And I do believe it. God made the sky. He made the sun. And the white sunlight...and the red...and the blue. From molecules to mountains, there is nothing made that was made that He did not make! It was all His big idea, and it is very good.

I think about that when I look out my front window here in Montana and I gaze upon God’s Absarokas. My, my—what magnificence! Those great mountains stand proudly, pointing upward to their Source. Psalm 65:6 reminds me that it was God “who formed the mountains by (His) power.” Sometimes the sky surrounding those mountains is brilliant blue and sometimes….oh, sometimes it’s streaked with brilliant orange and pink fingers, even purples and greys or dotted with fluffy cotton clouds. That window has become my “praising place” as I stand and thank Him for allowing me to witness His artistry.

So, while there’s a good case to be made for understanding the scientific whys and wherefores of the natural world, I believe it’s even more critical to believe and understand those marvelous words, “In the beginning, God…”