30 Wednesday Dec 2015
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The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2015 annual report for this blog.
Here’s an excerpt:
A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 3,600 times in 2015. If it were a cable car, it would take about 60 trips to carry that many people.
26 Saturday Dec 2015
Posted in Seasons
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We have been receiving Christmas and holiday letters from friends and family, and we appreciate every single one and the memories and hopes that go with them of treasured experiences together that the letters and cards represent. Often they bring tears of joy for the special times we have shared. Sometimes they bring tears of sadness, for we have reached the years when the frequent departure of friends and loved ones places them out of reach of everything but our prayers of gratitude for having known them. We want you to know that we send not only our greetings but our thanks and prayers for your lives, and our continuing praise to God for all of you wonderful people we have known and for the saving grace of Jesus Christ, who assures us that there is always more in store for our lives than what we have yet seen.
While this holiday time carries so much meaning in so many ways, for us it is still at its core an incarnation of the love of God in the Messiah who came, is yet to come, and is coming soon. In awe and mystery we see that loving person in the humblest of places, akin to the places where we have found ourselves and met you. Humbly we bow to adore Jesus, through whom we find that the ineffable Ruler of this universe (and all possible universes) does care for each of us.
Most of what we might report to you about our events and thoughts during this year has been on the “Gary Chapman” Facebook page or on chaplinesblog.com. We have lived in Burlington, Iowa, for twenty seven years, and part-time in Bella Vista, Arkansas, for fifteen years. Au and Alicia just celebrated their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, Brandi and Nathan recently celebrated their eighteenth, all continuing in their jobs and locales, with the addition of Alicia going to work as a receptionist at an O’Fallon assisted living center and nursing home, in addition to her contracts as a theatrical costumer. Grandchildren Willow graduated from the University of Illinois and began graduate studies in paleontology at the University of Nebraska- Lincoln, where she is deep into the Barstovian Era (into whose isotopes few researchers have gone before); Meadow just played seven characters in Sweet Charity as well as a lead in her first movie while a junior at Indiana University; and sweet Symphony turned purple as Ursula the Sea Witch in Little Mermaid, after being white as an Addams Family ancestor (and being green as Oz’s wicked witch two years ago)—she will graduate from O’Fallon High School with her Associate of Arts and Associate of Science degrees from Southwestern Illinois College, at the same time, in the coming May, then on to either Purdue University or Indiana University. Why do we feel that the pace of time is accelerating?
Jan’s mother fell and broke her neck C2 vertebra in August. She survived the fall, but now she contends with a brace that holds her head in place and protects her spinal cord. She had to leave her home and take up residence at the local nursing home, where our step-father of eighteen years, Glenn Edwards, visits daily. In order to identify with her mother (not intentionally!) Jan fell at the end of September, not breaking anything, but injuring herself severely anyway—we are thankful it wasn’t worse and she has been recovering well.
Gary enjoyed the responses of many people to the publishing of Out of My Hands and The River Flows Both Ways, and he is still editing Our Land! Our People!, a much longer narrative about the child John Bell on the Trail of Tears and his interesting life afterwards. During the year Jan and five distant cousins descended from her Great-great Grandfather John Bell had DNA testing to support or disprove his Native American ancestry, since the documentary evidence to corroborate the family tradition about John Bell was thin. Jan learned that she and her cousins have ancient Far East Asian and Yakutian (Siberian) DNA, common to Native Americans in the DNA records, which is as much supporting evidence as we can gain at the present time. It was nice to learn that we had Asians in our family before our beloved Au joined us, and that she had ancestors in America before her Puritan New England and seafaring ancestors arrived (or the Germans, Irish, or English Quakers who came later to the Middle Colonies and Illinois). DNA can only give us a little glimpse into the recesses of our past. Eventually it must show that we are all related anyway—one family in one world, all deeply in need of reconciliation.
It has not been an easy year, but we have enjoyed it anyway. More heart issues developed for Gary, but he runs regularly anyway. He has also continued teaching philosophy and ethics at Southeastern Community College, but this year it was all online, making travel easier during the courses. We made the usual travel circuit of Burlington, Bella Vista, O’Fallon, Champaign, Paxton, Mt. Sterling; Lincoln, Nebraska; and Bloomington, Indiana, adding another trip to the Black Hills and Mammoth Site, and a journey with Gary’s two brothers and sisters-in-law to Sevierville, Tennessee, at the height of the marvelous fall color, to celebrate all of our milestone birthdays—seventy, seventy-five, and eighty (a few months ahead of time for some of us).
We have plenty of cause for thanksgiving, and our prayers for the coming year include you and our hopes to be with you. May the peace of God bless you abundantly.
21 Monday Dec 2015
It’s not much of a tale, but it’s about one Christmas that stood out for this preacher. I had lived in Tilton only a few months, serving my first “called’’ and full-time pastorate at the United Church of Tilton. The start of work was not auspicious. The new church building had been completed the year before, with a lot of volunteer work from the congregation. There were only thirty-some members, and the Sunday School participation continued to be much larger than the worship attendance, as it had been for years, for worship began at 8 A.M., when families wanted to sleep in, and the people were accustomed to having a part-time pastor who served a larger church somewhere else, so the early hour was the only time that their pastor had been available. The new parsonage had finally been finished so my family—my wife and two small children—could move in. Our second car, “Sam,” had burned up with an engine fire, so we were back to having one car to share between my wife and myself. The youth group, built around the sports enthusiasms of the previous part-time youth worker, had fallen apart.
The leaders of the congregation were eager to encourage me, and they somehow had faith that we could make this new organization self-sustaining with a truly community-serving and Christ-centered purpose. There were few traditions, although we built on some that had begun in each of the fore-runner congregations that merged and began anew with their thirty combined members. We observed Advent with the lighting of Advent candles, collected gifts for the Delmo Community Organization, went caroling at nursing facilities and the homes of shut-ins, and prepared a children’s musical program for the Sunday School. In worship, the Sunday before Christmas, when all the singing, preaching, and praying was over, the congregation presented me with a gift.
Don Dunavan was one of the sturdy deacons, chief at the fire department, busy creating equipment at one of the local machine shops, raising four children, caring for his elderly mother, always available at church for jobs that needed doing. He came riding down the aisle on a bright red Schwinn bicycle. “We understood that you needed some transportation to do your visiting around town, so we bought you this bicycle. From now on, you will be known in Tilton as the peddlin’ parson.”
Visiting with people in the town, finding needs and filling them, had become my primary occupation. The bicycle became my main mode of transportation. I did a lot of cold calling, getting to know people and what they were interested in, talking about the church’s new start and hopes to serve the needs of the community. For the most part people were receptive. When I heard of someone wanting to talk, or a problem that had arisen for anyone, I made a contact and arranged a visit.
One man, Albert Cox, lived by himself, had no family, and had never had a relationship with any church. He didn’t have any interest in taking part in any group either, but he did like the idea of a church that would respond to people’s needs and try to serve the town. He hadn’t known any preachers before, he said, but he welcomed me into his home, and we talked about ways things could be improved for people’s lives. He was concerned about the town cemetery, which had fallen into disuse and decay, without a supervisory board to take care of it, and about the youth not having Scouting or recreational organizations to channel their energies. He had a lot of good ideas, though he wasn’t ever comfortable joining with other people in trying to implement them. Still we were able to find ways to work on them.
Years later, when Albert died and I was long gone from the community, his will designated his estate (a half-million dollars) in equal parts to a historical museum for the town and to the United Church of Tilton to be used for a community fellowship hall and gym. When I returned to the church thirty-five years later, I learned that I was remembered for three things—being a peddlin’ parson who visited people in the community, running a school-outside -the-walls activity program for youth, and visiting Albert Cox.
16 Wednesday Dec 2015
Posted in Events, Growing up, Learning from mistakes, Seasons
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My brother and I never had a reason to be in my parents’ bedroom when they were not there. The room was upstairs in a ‘newer’ wing of the hundred-some year-old farmhouse where we grew up. We gained access to the bedroom by going through the bathroom that replaced one of the three tiny bedrooms of the original story-and-a-half cabin. (You might say that it became the ‘Master Suite’ except that there was only one ‘inside’ bathroom in that house, and everyone used it when it worked, which was only part of the time.) Obviously my parents were not at home when we went into their bedroom. My older brother, David, must have been about thirteen, and me, eight, when this event occurred. We felt safe in sneaking in.
David thought he knew where the Christmas gifts must be kept—in the little closet at the far end of the bedroom. He opened the door and rummaged through the clothing and shoes to get to the hidden part of the closet, and he said that—sure enough—there were packages back there. Did I want to see what I was getting?
Of course, I wanted to see. What was I doing in that room with him if I didn’t want to see what I was getting for Christmas? What eight year old boy wouldn’t want to know ahead of time? At that moment something told me not to look and not to ask and not to let him tell me. I shrank from knowing ahead of the time how my parents wanted to surprise me.
My brother became a generous man. Perhaps it was an early manifestation of his generosity that he was sharing with me this escapade into sneakerdom. He certainly didn’t have to include his bothersome little brother in this opportunity. He didn’t need me as an accomplice either. It is not clear in my memory that my mother discovered this intrusion into the back corners of her closet, but she was observant and she probably did, and my brother probably paid for the infraction of unwritten Christmas rules with the humiliating insight that he could not be trusted in that day’s responsibility.
Among the many gifts coming from my parents that I do remember from those childhood years, I do not remember what I received on that particular Christmas, except the knowledge that I could be tempted, and that finally I could resist the temptation of knowing what I wasn’t supposed to know ahead of time. I could wait and be patient and learn in due time. That, and what my brother learned, were the most important and memorable gifts from that Christmas.
13 Sunday Dec 2015
Posted in Events, Growing up, Learning from mistakes
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Like most families we had some Christmas morning rituals when I was a child. We arose early, full of excitement, but several steps preceded the first glimpse of the Christmas stockings and the gifts under the tree. We had to put on our clothes for the day, check to see if Santa had found the cookies and milk left on the kitchen table, and, of course, he had. Then we had to finish a full breakfast, which, for me, was probably my favorite—orange juice, and toast with mayonnaise—I wasn’t much of a breakfast eater in those days. If there were any chores that needed to be done before we gathered around the tree, they were done, like milking the cows or checking on the waterers, to make sure that they were open and not frozen. Finally, all together, my two brothers, Mom and Dad, and I got to go into the living room, and open the stockings first, the oldest going first, and then the wrapped presents under the tree, again starting with the oldest among us. We were naturally eager to get everything out of the way, and on with the business of opening the presents.
On one Christmas morning, when I was probably six or so, when my brothers and I were rushing down the narrow stairway that ran from the second floor bedrooms down to the kitchen, I tripped near the bottom step, fell, and ran my knee right into the metal grate at the base of the stairs. It was a nasty little gash that bled enough to need cleaning and bandaging, further delaying the goal of our hurried descent. I don’t know which hurt more, my knee or the delay.
I should have learned then not to hurry through the steps that approach the gifts of Christmas. I should have learned.
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