Category Archives: Prayer

The Dove that Would Not Fly Away

03 Sunday Dec 2017

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dove   As a participant in church youth activities and outings, he was one of those young men who was always athletic, good-natured, cooperative, and congenial. When he graduated from high school and enlisted in the Army, following in the military footsteps of his relatives, we sent him off with every expectation that he would succeed and serve admirably. Toward the end of his basic training we received the terrible news that he had killed himself, alone in his barracks, when everyone else was away on leave. Family and friends were devastated. As his pastor officiating at his funeral I also was at a loss to speak much more than our affection and appreciation for the young man we knew and to pray that God heal his and our broken hearts.
People took part in the funeral with the open emotions and incredulity that come with a largely young adult crowd. Even those of us who were much older could only register our questions and grief. Tears and comforting hugs passed abundantly. The crowd moved to the cemetery in old Aspen Grove, where the trees provided graveside shade on a sunny afternoon, on the edge of a slope into a sheltered valley.
The family had chosen a symbol that seemed fitting of the idea of the spirit’s release into the heavens—a white dove, actually a homing pigeon, freed at the end of the graveside committal service to fly away. Only the bird, once freed, made a circle and came right back to the casket to perch. A little polite waving had no effect on the bird. We proceeded, of course, to complete the actions at the cemetery, accommodating the presence of the white dove.
Family and friends returned to the grave in the following days, only to find the dove nearby or at the marker. “What does this mean?” they asked each other, until presumably the owner of the pigeon came to claim his bird and take him home. Not believing that everything necessarily has a meaning, I deferred to others’ answers. Still, I heard people say often enough that he did not really want to leave us and needed to find a way to let us know.

The Luck of a Clown

20 Monday Nov 2017

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Self-potrait 1988  A six-year old boy put his name in the box for a drawing at the Grab-It-Here grocery store in Paxton. The prize he was hoping for was the shiny new Schwinn bicycle in the store window. Other prizes were on display, but the bike was the one that had his full attention. A couple of weeks later he learned that his name was drawn. He was a lucky winner, but not the winner of a bicycle. He won a stuffed clown, about half as big as he was. His mother brought it home, and he kept it for many years, since it was and remained the only thing he was lucky enough to win. Some luck, he thought.
Probably many objects attracted his attention and his hopes that he might be lucky enough to gain, but most were insubstantial, and their unimportance made them forgettable. The important things, he realized somewhere along the way, exceeded the realm of luck. To go to college and graduate school and get the scholarships, grants and fellowships to pay for them, to find a loving mate and to have her willing to marry him, even with the poverty and insecurity of the times in which they lived, to study for the ministry and find three churches that would accept him as their pastor, to have children and raise them to be responsible and successful adults—these were beyond the luck of the draw. In applying for a doctoral program, he was asked what he expected to be doing in ten, twenty, thirty years, and he answered that he expected to be a pastor doing his work well, and part of the time he wanted to teach philosophy, ethics, or bible, his academic interests, possibly at a community college, where a variety of ages and interests would be present. He was admitted to the doctoral program, and he completed it.
Ten years later he found himself in emergency rooms, successively on several occasions, until enough information accumulated to provide a diagnosis of the heart problems involved, stemming from childhood infections. The cardiologist told him that if he was lucky, without changing his lifestyle, he would probably live about seven years until he required at least an open-heart surgery. Not believing in luck, he chose to change his lifestyle—eating, drinking, exercising, and dealing with stress.
In all of these matters he was more than lucky, although not one of these was something that he could have completed by himself. If he had been confident enough to call this his life plan, then he also would have to be exceedingly happy to realize that the plan had been fulfilled even beyond his dreams. Now that boy is a seventy-one-year old man, still marveling that he has been, not so lucky, but so blessed to have had his dreams realized, and then some.
The future is still open and unknown, and his aims seem to be transforming the earlier goals into forms that are more limited and manageable in the years to come, according to the strength and breath that remain—still exercising, more slowly, and writing, teaching, finding ways to be helpful to family, friends, and the world beyond.

An Answer to Prayer

15 Wednesday Nov 2017

Posted by in Forest, Growing up, Hiking, Nature, Prayer

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deer & fawn
I rolled out my sleeping bag on the wooden planks of the log cabin porch at Morgan-Monroe State Forest in Indiana. Nestled in a wooded valley next to a loudly gurgling brook, the cabin was a century old, but I was barely thirteen. I felt much older because the other Boy Scouts and I had hiked twenty-five miles that day. The back-country sheds and shacks we had passed, with roaming cows, pigs, chickens, and assorted other creatures, must have been like the little farmsteads my people had come from many decades before in Ohio and Pennsylvania and Virginia, unlike the treeless prairie in central Illinois where I was born. The autumn splendor of the trees and hills surpassed anything I had yet seen.
The night was cool and star-studded, and the porch was more inviting to me than the dark interior of the cabin. Wherever we chose, we lay down to sleep. The attempts to whisper inside the cabin were just audible. They thought I couldn’t hear, and they were talking about me. They were telling a lie about something I had done, poking fun at it. It was something important to me, one of the first things in my life that I was really proud of doing. I was angry and ready to go in and set them straight. But the plank floor was too comfortable, and the stars were shining brightly, and I asked God how I should defend myself, and all I heard was the music of the stars and the distant whippoorwill.
The next morning I awoke before anyone else to a misty sunrise filtering through the trees. To my surprise there was a doe and fawn drinking from the brook barely twenty feet from the porch where I was lying. I had never before seen deer in the wild. They finished drinking and the doe wandered toward me and stopped at the railing and looked at me, our eyes meeting. Then she slowly turned and nudged the fawn and bounded away.
Life was good, and life has remained so. Some things are so beautiful that they erase all thoughts of the ugly. I no longer felt the need to correct the misinformation that the boys had spoken about me. Nor did I tell them about the deer. I just proceeded to fix the best breakfast outdoors that those fellows had ever eaten, and I said the blessing.

Showers of Blessing? September 1998

15 Wednesday Nov 2017

Posted by in Church, Faith, Growing up, Nature, Prayer, rafting, Seasons, Travel

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Milford 2  The church youth group was on its way from Burlington, Iowa, to Colorado for some camping, rafting, horseback riding, and other mountain-loving activities cherished by flatlanders. We stopped to camp on our first night at Milford State Park in central Kansas and set up on a gentle slope overlooking the lake. During the night a five-inch deluge left our campground looking like stacks of cast-off clothing after a flood. One of our teenage campers was heard saying, “If I had a bus ticket I’d be on my way home now.” Old hands at camping, of which we had only a few, said, “There, there, now, in a day or two, when we’ve had a chance to dry out, everything will look brighter.”
We had rain every day except one. Mostly we got used to it and adapted, using coin-operated laundries when necessary, and learning how to set up tents so the contents would stay dry…mostly. Every major activity that we planned, including the rafting, we got to enjoy without the rain’s interference. When rafting, the first thing we learn anyway is that we get wet. We read Psalms each morning and evening, and several passages claimed that God was in charge of the clouds and the rain. That made us wonder a bit about the messages we were getting.
We also read Ezekiel 34:26 about the “showers of blessing” God brings. The Gospel song of course came to mind. The trip proceeded as smoothly as any we had planned, either for service or for fellowship. No vehicles broke down. Everyone cooperated with few moments of tension. We kept the schedule of reservations and plans for each day. We covered 2500 miles in nine days. The showers kept us on our toes, depending on God to provide, which God did, as far as we were concerned. Getting wet unintentionally and getting wet purposely didn’t make much difference after a while.
When we got home to Iowa we found that Iowa was dry as a bone. Until the end of August it remained so. Somehow the field crops continued to grow, with just enough moisture to keep going. One of the congregation’s farmers, Don Thie, came dripping wet into the first fall choir rehearsal, and he said, “Since I prayed for rain, I guess I should learn to carry an umbrella.”
We also found that, while we were on the road, one of the church members, Chuck Murray, had installed a shower in our basement restroom, so that our overnighters, drop-in-travelers, service project workers, runners, and any other sweaty folks would have a convenient place to clean up.
So we began the fall season that year with dozens of plans that we hoped would recharge and enhance the life of our community, and we sang the old song with renewed hope, “Showers of blessing; showers of blessings we need; mercy drops ‘round us are falling, but for the showers we plead.”

Hidden Doors

11 Saturday Nov 2017

Posted by in Farm, House, Learning from mistakes, Prayer

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Hidden pocket doors at the Chapman farm Oct 2016  We reoccupied the farmhouse in October of 2016, after sixteen years of renting the house to two other families. We could not continue to rent the house to others when many major repairs and updates were required. We decided to live at the house a good share of the time while we work on it, enjoy the farm environment, and appreciate the memories made in the only house that my parents ever owned.
The first task was to remove the wall-to-wall carpeting from the main and the second floor. The main floor carpet was approaching thirty years of use; the second floor included carpets that were threadbare after fifty years and more. Nothing was salvageable from these carpets or their pads. Underneath were the original Southern yellow pine floors, hard, durable, and needing refinishing, which would wait until other tasks were completed.
The second task was one that had waited through years of my wondering curiosity—discovering what was hidden in the walls between the three living rooms on the main floor. One room serves as a dining room, one as a living room, and the last as a library, with a small half bath carved out of its corner. The walls between these rooms were thicker than normal in their construction. Vinyl folding doors had separated the rooms, and those doors had been added before we first occupied the house in 1963. They were obviously not original to the 1915 design. The last renters had removed those vinyl doors as they began to fall apart.
I verified my first suspicion, that the wall between the living room and library contained two heating channels for the second floor, justifying its larger size. I suspected that the other and thicker wall, between the dining and living rooms, had once contained pocket doors that matched the five-section ladder door design throughout the rest of the house. It was not likely that they were still there. Prying the plywood cover off of the door jam revealed the answer. There had been pocket doors there, and they still were there, pushed back into the pocket and covered. One rolled out easily, just as it had originally. The other rolled out a few inches and stopped, resisting to roll farther. They both were covered with dust, after their exile for sixty years or more., but underneath the dust was a beautiful finish, just waiting to be cleaned.
I surmised that the reason someone had hidden the doors was due to the failure of the one door to roll properly. There was no other evident problem with it. My son-in-law Au arrived soon after I had discovered the doors. He grabbed a flashlight, found an easy-to-reach adjustment mechanism, borrowed a screw driver and did a little adjustment, and that door worked perfectly, like the other. No mechanical problems defies Au for long.
How often do we give up on solving a problem before we’ve made a sufficient effort to find an answer? How often do we substitute something that is of poorer quality for something that just needs a little adjustment? How often do we live with something that is unsatisfying before we return to something that is beautiful and durable? How often do we hide doors instead of opening them? Oh, the lessons! The lessons keep rolling out.

Points of Pastoral Privilege

09 Thursday Nov 2017

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Pentecostal banner   When I was fifteen, my pastor, Glen Sims, introduced me to one of the potentially high and holy moments that ministers get to experience. He took me to visit an elderly woman near death. “If you are thinking about becoming a minister, you must be able to be with people in their most difficult times.” The woman was herself the wife of a minister who had died several years before. She observed my youth, naivete, and shyness with her own years of experience, wisdom, and serenity. “You have a wonderful life ahead of you. I enjoyed almost all of it myself. But I have a wonderful life ahead of me, too.” Such was her faith.
Up to that point, the privilege of being with people at very special and terrifying times was an aspect of ministry that was hidden to me. I had observed the work of worship, even helping to serve communion at the kneeling rail around the altar, as was the Methodist custom of those days. Pastor Sims had invited me on a few occasions to lead a pastoral prayer in front of the congregation, and he loaned me Harry Emerson Fosdick’s Prayers, so I had a model to use. I knew about the activities of meetings and Church School classes, and youth events. I had no idea about being with people who were sick, or dying, or in crisis, or grieving. I could not imagine trying to moderate disputes between angry spouses or alienated family members, or aggrieved church members, or offended community people. The thought of being an advocate for people who were poor or needy or in trouble had not crossed my mind. Eventually he and other mentors introduced me to these challenges of ministry.
These are privileges that the people of the church make possible for their ministers and to some extent for each other. The door opens to the hardest challenges that people face. The embrace is extended. The chair is offered. The mutual tears are shed. The horrible fears are faced together and with the halting words of fervent prayer.
I told my pastor that I didn’t think I had the strength for this. I asked him how he was able to do it. I can still hear him admit that he wasn’t able, not on his own. He talked about a power greater than he was, greater than anyone on their own, that lets people come together in such times and struggle together. God’s Spirit comes and helps people face the hardest trials and get through them.
In thousands of episodes that followed—hospital visits, counseling sessions, emergency calls, and everything else—some moments remained terrifying enough to send me back to some quiet corner where I might enjoy being a gardener, a scholar, a writer, or anything other than a pastor. My own pastor’s words became flesh many times over. There are holy moments when our God of compassion and wisdom comes near enough to be tangible in the air we breathe and the light we see. Blood, sweat, and tears all yield their power and make room for the mysterious presence of the Living God.

July 13, 2017, Tornado Warning!

27 Friday Oct 2017

Posted by in Events, Faith, Farm, Miracles, Nature, Prayer

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funnel cloud photo
Two previous storms did significant damage to our Chapman farm near Paxton. The first came from the southwest, around 2000, and ripped a roof off a lean-to shed on the west side of the corn crib, and laid that roof on the ground next to the then-new machine shed. That wind also toppled half of the concrete block south wall of the three-car garage. Brother David and I spent a week dismantling the rest of that lean-to, learning how our father had built it with heavy timbers and 7-inch nails, and making ourselves more tired than we could remember. We hired the repair of the garage.
The second storm, five years later, brought a straight-line wind from the north, that blew a window out of the master bedroom, irreparably damaged the vinyl siding on the north side of the house, blew down the large hackberry tree between the house and the old shed, which our father had built out of full-dimension lumber from the original 1860 farmhouse. That shed stood undamaged, but the power lines supplying it came down with the tree. The wind also toppled half of the north wall of the three-car garage. I cut up the tree, except for the massive four-foot diameter trunk. For the rest of the work I hired the Sutton brothers.
Since last October Jan and I have worked regularly to clean, fix, rehabilitate, and refurnish the 1915 foursquare house. It’s been a lot of work, and much remains to be done before we call it finished. This July we looked across the broad river valley west of the house and saw a dark wall cloud coming ten miles away that the weather radio warned us about—a tornado was coming, located between Elliot and Melvin, headed our way. We saw it at a distance as it formed a perfect funnel and began to raise a debris cloud from the ground. The next twenty minutes passed like lava, as the storm clouds seemed to stand still. Jan and I headed for the basement, taking our warning radio and cell phones with us. While Jan took a seat in a camp chair in the inside corner of one basement room, I watched the storm approach through a ground-level window in another basement room. I watched the tornado coming and a second funnel forming alongside the first.
Of course I prayed, thanking God for the relative safety of a full basement with thick brick walls that had withstood storms on this “hilltop” for a hundred and two years. If the rest of the house would be removed, and Jan and I could survive, then I would be even more thankful! In the face of that tornado, we could willingly say goodbye to the house even with the precious memories it contained. There was nothing between us and the two funnels, as they appeared to be missing our neighbor’s farmstead by a few hundred yards, still heading straight toward us.
Wall clouds and funnels are extremely interesting to watch, as well as terrifying. My heart was pounding and my excitement level jumping as I watched the bases of the two funnels dance, away from each other and toward each other, in a powerful tango. When they were about a quarter mile away, still coming slowly, and I was ready to abandon my post by the window for the safety of the other room with Jan, I saw the two tornado funnels move into each other and lift off the ground. As if one funnel canceled the other, within seconds they lifted from the ground and disappeared into the black cloud above. The house was peppered with dime-sized hail, small branches, dirt, and light field debris.
A few minutes later, as the rain continued but the winds began to subside, we moved upstairs and watched the darkest clouds move farther to the east. The tornado warning continued over the radio, but, to my knowledge, no significant damage was done. We looked around the house and the yard, and there was still work to be done, but it was not the work of picking up the pieces.

Seeing Jesus

11 Tuesday Apr 2017

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Pentecostal banner

Lillian lived a rough life. She had been married a short time, but she got out of it because she saw quickly that it had been a mistake. She made a living as a secretary, in an assembly line, and finally as a clerk in a package liquor store. She was a chain smoker for many years, so it was not a surprise when Chronic Pulmonary Disease took over her final years.

Her older sister, Margaret, on the other hand, lived a comfortable life, married to Bob for over fifty years, mother of two daughters, who were also married and raising families. With her husband, Margaret was active in her church and as a volunteer in the community, but she never had to earn a living outside of the home. Margaret always worried about her little sister, and when Lillian became sick and lived by herself, she made sure that her sister had a comfortable home near her own, had help when she needed it, and that her pastor would visit Lillian and, with the Elders, offer her communion as they did for other shut-ins in the community.

That is how I met Lillian. She didn’t resemble her sister, until she shared a picture of them together as young women. When I met her, Lillian was extremely thin, wrinkled, and leathery, while Margaret was plump, relatively youthful-looking, and often smiling. They were a study in contrasts in appearance, temperament, and life histories.

Underneath the obvious differences, they did share not only their childhood history, but other characteristics as well. They both had worked hard in their own ways and neither took an easy route when the harder route appeared better. Both were questioners and somewhat skeptical, not accepting a superficial answer, but digging deeper. In spite of the different paths their lives had taken, they shared many values underneath the surface.

Lillian did not respond immediately when I first visited her. She seemed a little irked that her sister had asked me to come. She was distant and unresponsive, but I persisted, saying that I liked to keep in touch with the people of our village, whether they were church members or not, just to see if there were needs that we could fill, which was part of our purpose as a church, and Margaret was one of those who made sure that we served that purpose. It was my usual spiel when talking to our non-member and indifferent neighbors. She allowed me to come and eventually to bring the communion elements that she had not received since she was a young woman.

Eventually her health deteriorated to the point that she no longer could stay at home and use oxygen there. She made several trips back and forth to the hospital and spent her final year in a nursing home, where I continued to see her about once a month. It was likely in her last trip to the hospital that she would not be discharged back to the nursing home. She seemed to be slipping deeper into unresponsiveness every day.

Then one day it was different, and she seemed to be unusually bright and alert. After a few light comments, she announced that she had a wonderful experience the night before. Jesus had come to visit her. She saw that I was taken aback, for she continued, “No, really. I know that you were here earlier, even though I didn’t feel like talking. And I know what you’re thinking—that I mistook you with your beard for him, but it really was him. I know the difference between you and Jesus! Don’t think I don’t!”

By this time we both were smiling, for this was the old plain-spoken Lillian that I hadn’t seen for a while. “Well, then, what did Jesus say to you, that made such a difference in you?”

 “He said, not to worry, that I would be coming home with him tomorrow night, and I would be able to breathe again. We had a wonderful talk, and then I relaxed and fell asleep. When I awoke he was gone.”

I don’t know what else we said about that visit with Jesus, but soon I was praying a thank you prayer with Lillian, and telling her that, one way or another, I expected to see her again. That night she fell asleep for the last time.

Part 2: “I sought the Lord, and afterward…”

16 Thursday Mar 2017

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Pentecostal bannerThere was a retreat for campus leaders just before the beginning of my sophomore year, which resulted in the development of a goal—a campus coffeehouse. As the newly elected president of the Methodist Student Movement, I took part, and I was excited about the idea of a place where people could come to talk informally and explore serious issues of the day—religious, social and political issues. Other campus venues seemed to be purely social or academic, not existentially grounded, and not open to student leadership. When leaders in the Student Senate developed the idea, however, it leaned more toward an intimate center for student performance as actors and musicians, than an organizing center for serious conversation. I publicly criticized the development as a betrayal of the original purpose.

There was a lot of support for the developing performance center coffeehouse idea, and I failed to provide a coherent and attractive vision of a place where we dealt with heady issues. It was embarrassing. Clearly the different visions for using the coffeehouse were not mutually exclusive, and I apologized for my critique. We would get to use the coffeehouse for many different issue conversations and presentations, but my criticism had proven counter-productive for the “Student Movement.” I had alienated some of the people I wanted as allies and dialogue partners.

Other matters added to my emotional turmoil. A trip to Chicago to take part in the SCLC-sponsored open housing marches had opened my eyes to the violence of the opposition to racial integration on Chicago’s southwestern suburbs. The war was expanding in Southeast Asia where the “Ugly American” had colored the conflict. My health was deteriorating. A friend whom I had joined for morning prayer frequently in my freshman year had become obsessed with Hindu yoga meditation, and I was not willing to pursue that for more than the satisfaction of curiosity. I was not finding a way through the spiritual solipsism that had confounded me.

In the middle of the fall semester a new hymnal was published for the Methodist Church, and Choir Professor David Nott invited everyone to the Presser Auditorium one evening to explore the hymnal. I was not involved in the choirs, but music was always helpful when I was distressed, and the prospect of hearing familiar and new hymns attracted me. Dr. Nott led enthusiastically. Then he introduced a hymn and arrangement that was new to him, though an anonymous person had written the words a century before: “I sought the Lord, and afterward I knew, God moved my soul to seek ‘him,’ seeking me. It was not I that found, O Savior true; no, I was found by You.”

I was singing the song and praying the words, and suddenly I realized that the experience was real, and I was filled with a joy that had no measure. “You did reach forth Your hand and mine enfold; I walked and sank not on the stormy sea; not so much that I on You took hold, as You, dear Lord, on me.” Every word added to my joy through the last verse. “I find, I walk, I love, but oh, the whole of love is but my answer, Lord, to You! For You were long beforehand with my soul, Always You loved me.”

I had not yet read C. S. Lewis Surprised by Joy, although John Wesley’s sense of “having his heart warmed” was always entertained in my thoughts. This experience went far beyond either, as I felt so light that I nearly floated out into the night when the program ended. This was the experience of God’s Real Presence.

Real challenges would bring me back down to earth, and the awareness that my ideas of God would always fall far short of the reality of God’s Spirit would keep me from lifting my thoughts too high. There would be more to come than insight, more than comfort, more than strength, more than an answer to my feeble prayers.

A Panegyric Upon Plymouth

24 Thursday Nov 2016

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cornfields

The only time I have been invited to preach at a college chapel service was for Illinois Wesleyan University just before Thanksgiving in 1969. I chose the presumptuous title of “A Panegyric Upon Plymouth” as my sermon title, drawing from Soren Kierkegaard’s “A Panegyric Upon Abraham” and the historical fictions surrounding the founding of Thanksgiving as a national holiday.

A panegyric is supposed to be an oration or public address in praise of something or someone. By using the scripture of the Pharisee and the publican as the scripture text for the sermon, my praise was reserved for the publican who approached God humbly and with repentance, in contrast with the Pharisee who proudly thanked God that he was not like other people because he was so much better. With no small amount of sarcasm, I compared the Pharisee to the usual message of thanksgiving in America and expressed the hope that we would learn to use the publican as a model instead.

My delivery was not so good that evening. I recall that my wife compared it to a dirge, since it was slow and halting. I was nervous and had never preached to a college audience in such a formal setting. My mentor, Chaplain Bill White, gave me the benefit of the doubt and said that sometimes it takes a while for a message to sink in and later people come it understand it better. Probably they would understand it from someone else who spoke it more effectively.

Maybe no one else understands that message better, but I do. If the legend of Thanksgiving bears any truth, it is in the generosity and good will of the Wampanoag people in helping the pilgrims to survive, even though the Wampanoag themselves had suffered the worst decade of their own existence as a people. As a result of the pilgrims and the actions of later puritans, we can attest that “no good deed goes unpunished.”

When President Barack Obama addressed the Arab nations in Egypt early in his presidency, expressing regret for some of the actions and attitudes represented in United States’ interventions in the Middle East (never using the word ‘apology’ although that was later used by Obama’s critics), my thoughts returned to my earlier diagnosis of American pride. We have not learned to be humble supplicants to a gracious and merciful God. Our ideas of American greatness are distorted and deadly to the future of the earth. We need to appreciate the humanity that we share with people everywhere, and realize the failures that also come with that humanity. We need to learn humbly from each other. We can only be grateful that God has given much more, much more than we deserve, and perhaps we will have more chances to do some good with what we have received.