Category: joy

Seeing Clearly

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Things said or done long years ago,
Or things I did not do or say
But thought that I might say or do,
Weigh me down, and not a day
But something is recalled,
My conscience or my vanity appalled.
~William Butler Yeats from “Vacillation”

photo by Emily Dieleman

We wanted to confess our sins but there were no takers.
White clouds refused to accept them, and the wind
Was too busy visiting sea after sea.
We did not succeed in interesting the animals.
Dogs, disappointed, expected an order,
A cat, as always immoral, was falling asleep.
A person seemingly very close
Did not care to hear of things long past.
Conversations with friends over vodka or coffee
Ought not be prolonged beyond the first sign of boredom.
It would be humiliating to pay by the hour
A man with a diploma, just for listening.
Churches. Perhaps churches. But to confess there what?
That we used to see ourselves as handsome and noble
Yet later in our place an ugly toad
Half-opens its thick eyelid
And one sees clearly: “That’s me.”
~Czeslaw Milosz “At a Certain Age”

photo by Nate Gibson

I have a brief confession
that I would like to make.
If I don’t get it off my chest
I’m sure my heart will break.

I didn’t do my reading.
I watched TV instead—
while munching cookies, cakes, and chips
and cinnamon raisin bread.

I didn’t wash the dishes.
I didn’t clean the mess.
Now there are roaches eating crumbs—
a million, more or less.

I didn’t turn the TV off.
I didn’t shut the light.
Just think of all the energy
I wasted through the night.

I feel so very guilty.
I did a lousy job.
I hope my students don’t find out
that I am such a slob.
~Bruce Lansky “Confession”

Norman Rockwell’s “Before the Shot”
photo by Barb Hoelle

We all have confessions we could make.
We all want to avoid admitting mistakes and failings.
We all live under the black cloud of knowing our guilt and shame.

I have plenty of opportunity to replay the many moments I’ve regretted what I said or did,
or what I could have said or did….and didn’t.
Recalling remorse is far easier and stickier
than replaying joy that seems so fleeting in my memory.

There are times when I feel both weighed down by memories
and freed at the same time.

It almost always happens while sitting in worship in church,
silently confessing how I have wronged those around me
or turned my face from God.

Yet in the next moment,
I feel the embrace of a Creator who never forgets but still forgives.
It is an overwhelming knowledge that brings me to tears every time.

It is in that moment that my joy no longer is fleeting;
it lives deeply in my cells since I, like all around me,
am created in His image.

And no, we don’t look like a toad.

God saw what He made in His image,
and it was, and still is, good –
though flawed in our own choices.
He made each of us out of love for us,
not out of regret.
We each open our heavy eyelids, see His Face
and can say, “That’s me.”

toad picture by Josh Scholten

Balancing Between Earth and Sky

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Every child should know a hill,
And the clean joy of running down its long slope
With the wind in his hair.
He should know a tree—
The comfort of its cool lap of shade,
And the supple strength of its arms
Balancing him between earth and sky
So he is a creature of both.
He should know bits of singing water—
The strange mysteries of its depths,
And the long sweet grasses that border it.
Every child should know some scrap
Of uninterrupted sky, to shout against;
And have one star, dependable and bright,
For wishing on.
~Edna Casler Joll “Every Child Should Know a Hill”

photo of a windy day at Manna Farm by Danyale Tamminga

When I was younger
the world was full of wonder.
Forests were kingdoms.
Following the wind was freedom.
Children wielded branches
like sharpened swords

There was no separation
between dream and reality
no border to defend,
Blanket forts were impenetrable.
The monsters in the closets
could not reach us there.

We ruled from treetop towers.
We danced in the rain.
We needed no permission
to believe in the sacred.
It was simply everywhere.
It was simply
everything.

In those days
we were of the living.
~Logan Holder “Of the Living”

How brief are our childhood days,
when we can touch both earth and sky
without knowing any limits,
how we can fly downhill
and climb impossible obstacles,
how the ocean stretches to infinity
as our imagination sails away.

I now watch these treasured young friends I’ve watched grow,
held as babies, taught new songs and games,
helped their faith grow,
now getting married,
ready to grow up children of their own.

This, the unending turn of the years,
a stretching tether connecting
one generation to another.

Everything sacred, held so close
until one day it is time to let go –
and once again run, climb, fly,
touching the earth and sky at once.

Lyrics by Keane:
I walked across an empty land
I knew the pathway like the back of my hand
I felt the earth beneath my feet
Sat by the river and it made me complete

Chorus: Oh, simple thing, where have you gone?
I’m getting old, and I need something to rely on
So, tell me when you’re gonna let me in
I’m getting tired, and I need somewhere to begin

I came across a fallen tree
I felt the branches of it looking at me
Is this the place we used to love?
Is this the place that I’ve been dreaming of?

And if you have a minute, why don’t we go
Talk about it somewhere only we know?
This could be the end of everything
So, why don’t we go somewhere only we know?
Somewhere only we know

And if you have a minute, why don’t we go
Talk about it somewhere only we know?
This could be the end of everything
So, why don’t we go?
So, why don’t we go?

This could be the end of everything
So, why don’t we go somewhere only we know?
Somewhere only we know
Somewhere only we know

Imagining Glory Beyond Measure

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The night of the Perseid shower,
thick fog descended
but I would not be denied.
I had put the children to bed,
knelt with them,
and later
in the quiet kitchen
as tall red candles
burned on the table between us,
I’d listened to my wife’s sweet imprecations,
her entreaties to see a physician.
But at the peak hour—
after she had gone to bed,
and neighboring houses
stood solemn and dark—
I felt no human obligation
and went without hope into the yard.
In the white mist
beneath the soaked and dripping trees,
I lifted my eyes
into a blind nothingness of sky
and shivered in a white robe.
I couldn’t see the outline
of the neighbor’s willows,
much less the host of streaking meteorites
no bigger than grains of sand
blazing across the sky.
I questioned the mind, my troubled thinking,
and chided myself to go in,
but looking up,
I thought of the earth
on which I stood,
my own
scanty plot of ground,
and as the lights passed unseen
I imagined glory beyond all measure.
Then I turned to the lights in the windows—
the children’s nightlights,
and my wife’s reading lamp, still burning.
~Richard Jones “The Manifestation”

Perhaps as a child you had the chicken pox
and your mother, to soothe you in your fever
or to help you fall asleep, came into your room
and read to you from some favorite book,
Charlotte’s Web or Little House on the Prairie,
a long story that she quietly took you through
until your eyes became magnets for your shuttering
lids and she saw your breathing go slow. And then
she read on, this time silently and to herself,
not because she didn’t know the story,
it seemed to her that there had never been a time
when she didn’t know this story—the young girl
and her benevolence, the young girl in her sod house—
but because she did not yet want to leave your side
though she knew there was nothing more
she could do for you. And you, not asleep but simply weak,
listened to her turn the pages, still feeling
the lamp warm against one cheek, knowing the shape
of the rocking chair’s shadow as it slid across
your chest. So that now, these many years later,
when you are clenched in the damp fist of a hospital bed,
or signing the papers that say you won’t love him anymore,
when you are bent at your son’s gravesite or haunted
by a war that makes you wake with the gun
cocked in your hand, you would like to believe
that such generosity comes from God, too,
who now, when you have the strength to ask, might begin
the story again, just as your mother would,
from the place where you have both left off.
~Keetje Kuipers “Prayer”

photo by Josh Scholten

Flung is too harsh a word for the rush of the world.
Blown is more like it, but blown by a generous, unending breath.
~Annie Dillard from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

How could it be possible? 

The five year old me had a sudden terrifying revelation that I would some day cease to walk this earth.

The much older me is more afraid of the faster and faster rush of the days than of their end. 

The world hurtles through space and time at a pace that leaves me breathless. Throughout my seventy-plus years, I have felt flung all too frequently, bruised and weary from hurry and hubbub.

I have need of Someone to stop me for a moment, sit down and begin the Story again with me, starting right where we left off.

Now, with retirement from daily work obligations: breathing space. 
I’m lifted lighter, drifting where I’m blown, less weighted down
by the next thing to do and the next place to be.

Instead I can just be…
part of the story to be told,
part of the wonder. 
Blown by breath that loves,
fills and nurtures,
a generous promise hopeful and fulfilled.

I’m grateful for the opportunity to see, even in the dark,
a manifestation of glory and love just beyond my vision,
praying that one day I will see and know it clearly.

The old me ~ 
Blown upon.

If only the five year old me could have known.

Something the World Should Know

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There we shall rest and we shall see;
we shall see and we shall love;
we shall love and we shall praise.
Behold what shall be in the end and shall not end.
~St. Augustine: ‘The City of God,’ Bk. XXII, Chap. 30.

The cows know. Standing still
in the pasture, chewing cud
and steadily swishing flies.
With those enormous eyes,
they look for all the world
as if they know.

The wind knows.
It whispers to the grass.
The grass tells the trees
who pass it on to the birds.
The crickets discover it
all on their own.

But you and I, we don’t.
Though on a day like today
when the sun is bright
and the cattails let loose
a flurry of tiny parachutes,
we sense there’s something
the world knows.

The dogs would tell us
if only we would listen.
~Kendall Dunkelberg”They Know” from Tree Fall with Birdsong

A man crosses the street in rain,
stepping gently, looking two times north and south,
because his son is asleep on his shoulder.

No car must splash him.
No car drive too near to his shadow.

This man carries the world’s most sensitive cargo
but he’s not marked.
Nowhere does his jacket say FRAGILE,
HANDLE WITH CARE.

His ear fills up with breathing.
He hears the hum of a boy’s dream
deep inside him.

We’re not going to be able
to live in this world
if we’re not willing to do what he’s doing
with one another.

The road will only be wide.
The rain will never stop falling.
~Naomi Shihab Nye “Shoulder” from Red Suitcase

And just what is it that we should know?
What are we missing that the cows, the wind, the trees, the grass, the birds, the crickets, the cattails, and certainly dogs know that we struggle to understand?

Simply this:
be content,
live aware of each moment as it comes,
be grateful for it and say so,
then have hope for the next moment, no matter how hard it may be.

Cherish whatever and whoever depends on us,
love them with all we’ve got.
Provide the shoulder that someone else needs.
Give ourselves away without expecting something in return.
Write it down so it is not lost.

We can see it deep in our dogs’ eyes. They know.

photo by Nate Gibson

Lit From Within

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For God, who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,” has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.
2 Corinthians 4:6

…there must take place that struggle
no human presumes to picture:
living, dying, descending to rescue the just
from shadow, were lesser travails
than this: to break
through earth and stone of the faithless world
back to the cold sepulchre, tearstained
stifling shroud; to break from them
back into breath and heartbeat, and walk
the world again, closed into days and weeks again,
wounds of His anguish open, and Spirit
streaming through every cell of flesh
so that if mortal sight could bear
to perceive it, it would be seen
His mortal flesh was lit from within, now,
and aching for home. He must return,
first, in Divine patience, and know
hunger again, and give
to humble friends the joy
of giving Him food—fish and a honeycomb.
~Denise Levertov from “Ikon: The Harrowing of Hell”

People are like stained-glass windows.  They sparkle and shine when the sun is out, but when the darkness sets in, their true beauty is revealed only if there is a light from within.
~ Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

Christ forced open a door that has been locked since the death of the first man. He has met, fought and beaten the king of death. Everything is different because he has done so.
~C.S. Lewis from Miracles

In my clinical work over four decades, I met people living with dark times. It is rare for a patient to come to clinic because all is well. 

They come because they are beaten down, struggling to keep going, running out of fuel, hungry for calm as they are blown about by the storms of life.

It was my challenge to stoke and feed the inner light hidden deep within each person, fighting back the darkness as I sorted out how to mend their unwellness.

I’m reminded Christ came back from the harrowing darkness of hell to be joyfully met by His disciples, who fed His hunger. Then He cooked breakfast for them, forever offering Himself as sanctuary from the darkness He had known.

So too, we are fed, bathing in His glow.

Lyrics
Jesus Christ, inner light,
let not our own darkness conquer us.
Jesus Christ, inner light,
enable us to welcome your love.
Jesus Christ, in our search for you,
Bring us into the warmth of your light.
Jesus Christ, inner light,
enable us to welcome your love.

Lyrics:
Through love to light!
Oh, wonderful the way
That leads from darkness to the perfect day!
From darkness and from sorrow of the night
To morning that comes singing o’er the sea.
Through love to light!
Through light, O God, to thee,
Who art the love of love, the eternal light of light!

A Lily Shivering

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A lily shivered
at His passing,
supposing Him to be
the Gardener.
~Margaret D. Smith “Easter morning, yesterday”
from A Widening Light -Poems of the Incarnation

It’s so easy to look and see what we pass through in this world, but we don’t. If you’re like me, you see so little. You see what you expect to see rather than what’s there.
~Frederick Buechner from The Remarkable Ordinary

Jesus said to them, “Come and have breakfast.”
None of the disciples dared ask him, “Who are you?”
They knew it was the Lord.
John 21:12

It is too easy, by the next day, to let go of Easter — to slide back into the Monday routine, managing our best to get through each day, our jaws set, our teeth gritted, as we have before.

We are blinded by our grief, shivering in misery, thinking Him merely a Gardener as He passed by. We don’t pay attention to Who is right before us, Who is always tending us: the new Adam, caring for a world desperate for rescue.

God knows this about us.  So He invites us to breakfast on Monday and every day thereafter.

He feeds us, a tangible and meaningful act of nourishing us in our most basic human needs though we’ve done nothing to deserve the gift. He cooks up fish on a beach at dawn and welcomes us to join Him, as if nothing extraordinary has just happened.

Just yesterday evening he reviewed His Word and broke bread in Emmaus, opening the eyes and hearts of those like us who failed to see Who this is walking beside them.

This is no ordinary Gardener – He is the one who created the original Garden, and as His image bearers, we humans were meant to maintain and grow it.

When He offers up a meal of His Word, His gift is nothing less than Himself.

He Got Up!

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So what do I believe actually happened that morning on the third day after he died?
…I speak very plainly here…

He got up.  He said, “Don’t be afraid.”

Love is the victor.  Death is not the end.  The end is life.  His life and our lives through him, in him. Existence has greater depths of beauty, mystery, and benediction than the wildest visionary has ever dared to dream.  Christ our Lord has risen.
~Frederick Buechner from The Magnificent Defeat  

Since this moment (the resurrection), the universe is no longer what it was;  nature has received another meaning; history is transformed and you and I are no more, and should not be anymore, what we were before.
~Paul Tillich, theologian

Make no mistake: if He rose at all
it was as His body;
if the cells’ dissolution did not reverse, the molecules
reknit, the amino acids rekindle,
the Church will fall…

It was not as the flowers,
each soft Spring recurrent;
it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled
eyes of the eleven apostles;
it was as His Flesh: ours.
~John Updike from “Seven Stanzas at Easter”

Our flesh is so weak, so temporary,
as ephemeral as a dew drop on a petal
yet with our earthly vision
it is all we know of ourselves
and it is what we trust knowing
of Him.

He was born as our flesh, from our flesh.
He walked and hungered and thirsted and slept
as our flesh.
He died, His flesh hanging in tatters,
blood spilling freely
breath fading
to nought
speaking Words
our ears can never forget.

And He rose again
as His flesh: ours
to walk and hunger and thirst alongside us
and here on this hill we meet together,
–flesh of His flesh–
here among us He is risen
–flesh of our flesh–
married forever
as the Church
and its fragile, flawed
and everlasting body.

The Lenten season is over; He is Risen!

So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.
2 Corinthians 4: 18

Bring to Light the Mystery: Leaping and Shouting

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photo by Josh Scholten

Then will the eyes of the blind be opened
and the ears of the deaf unstopped.
Then will the lame leap like a deer,
and the mute tongue shout for joy.
Isaiah 35:5-6

Scripture documents Jesus’ healing miracles for those of us who were not there to witness them – a touch of saliva to eyes and tongue, fingers placed in ears, words that give new life to paralyzed limbs. 

As a physician who has worked with many tools in healing over forty years, I do know the power of spoken words, or the comforting touch, but never used saliva and mud. 

There is nothing I can do with those simple means to reverse the irreversible. Of course many medical “miracles” happen every day in the 21st century, but the spit and words of the 1st century are far more miraculous because of from Whom they came.

These ancient miracles took place when a willing heart met Mercy head on. No surgery required, no expensive medications, no magnetic imaging, no robotic procedures. In comparison to the skills of the ultimate Physician, I’m humbled in my obvious limitations. I myself was a blind, deaf, dumb and lame healer, immobilized until I underwent a modern heart-opening procedure myself. Not just a cardiac intervention to dilate my coronary arteries, but the knowledge that my spiritual heart has been opened wide.

Grateful, I become unstoppable, as I too now leap and shout for joy.

painting by Norman Rockwell

This year’s Barnstorming Lenten theme is Ephesians 3:9:

…to bring to light for everyone what is the plan of the mystery hidden for ages in God, who created all things…

Bring to Light the Mystery: Impossible Blossom

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There shall come forth a shoot from the stump of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots.
Isaiah 11:1

There are days we live
as if death were nowhere
in the background; from joy
to joy to joy, from wing to wing,
from blossom to blossom to
impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.
~Li-Young Lee, from “From Blossoms” from Rose

I drag the lawn chair
to the center of the new lawn
where you have warned
it will ruin the delicate
grass. From here
I have a perfect view
of the pink camellia,
the one with rose-shaped flowers
which you secretly think
I have ignored. This is my camellia
viewing platform
I tell you, remembering
signposts in Japan.

… the camellia
opens its flesh-colored petals
with utter unself-consciousness,
releasing its scent
into the dangerous air.
~Linda Pastan from “Camellias” from Heroes in Disguise

In the midst of people dying
in war-torn countries,
as bombs drop and buildings fall to rubble –

we seek the peace of Someone
who is both truly man
yet very God –
an impossible Blossom blooming purposely
in the midst of our mess –

reminding us of Life and Light
He shines in the darkness where we all dwell;
this God who becomes a Man
impossibly shares the sweetness of His glorious splendor,
lightening our heavy load.

This gentle fragrant many-layered Bloom:
given to the undeserving
with joy and love
without reservation
without hesitation
from joy to joy to joy,
defeating death — our death.

This year’s Barnstorming Lenten theme is Ephesians 3:9:

…to bring to light for everyone what is the plan of the mystery hidden for ages in God, who created all things…

Last Stanza:
O Flow’r, whose fragrance tender
With sweetness fills the air,
Dispels in glorious splendor
The darkness ev’rywhere;
True man, yet very God,
From sin and death now saves us,
And shares our ev’ry load.

Come and See: Take Him At His Word

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After the two days he left for Galilee.  (Now Jesus himself had pointed out that a prophet has no honor in his own country.) When he arrived in Galilee, the Galileans welcomed him. They had seen all that he had done in Jerusalem at the Passover Festival, for they also had been there.

Once more he visited Cana in Galilee, where he had turned the water into wine. And there was a certain royal official whose son lay sick at Capernaum. When this man heard that Jesus had arrived in Galilee from Judea, he went to him and begged him to come and heal his son, who was close to death.

 “Unless you people see signs and wonders,” Jesus told him, “you will never believe.”

The royal official said, “Sir, come down before my child dies.”

 “Go,” Jesus replied, “your son will live.”

The man took Jesus at his word and departed. While he was still on the way, his servants met him with the news that his boy was living. When he inquired as to the time when his son got better, they said to him, “Yesterday, at one in the afternoon, the fever left him.”

Then the father realized that this was the exact time at which Jesus had said to him, “Your son will live.” So he and his whole household believed.

This was the second sign Jesus performed after coming from Judea to Galilee.
John 4: 43-54

Faith is to believe what you do not see;
the reward of this faith is to see what you believe.
Hebrews 11:1

Does the road wind up-hill all the way?
Yes, to the very end.

Will the day’s journey take the whole long day?
From morn to night, my friend.

But is there for the night a resting-place?
A roof for when the slow dark hours begin.

May not the darkness hide it from my face?
You cannot miss that inn.

Shall I meet other wayfarers at night?
Those who have gone before.

Then must I knock, or call when just in sight?
They will not keep you standing at that door.

Shall I find comfort, travel-sore and weak?
Of labour you shall find the sum.

Will there be beds for me and all who seek?
Yea, beds for all who come.
~Christina Rossetti “Up-Hill”

This life of ours can be an arduous and often troubled journey.

We might feel like we are never able to reach a point of rest in our uphill climb through obstacles and hazards. It can be so dark we’re not sure we can see the road, much less where we’re headed.

When a royal official makes the 20 hour journey uphill to find Jesus to ask him to heal and save his son, he surely was at a point of desperate need. He is so convinced by the stories of Jesus’ power to heal, he would go wherever needed to make that happen for his dying son.

Yet he discovers Jesus’ power is not just in His hands, but in His words.

Our faith is not just based on what we see with our eyes,
but in our trust and belief in Jesus, who is the Word.

When we are faced with that up-hill journey through troubled times, we will not be left stranded, lost and waiting by the roadside. Many have gone on before us, and those faithful are ready and waiting to help walk alongside us and give us encouragement to keep going.

There is a place waiting for wayfarers like us.

Jesus speaks the healing of the son
and the royal official takes Him at His Word.

No longer is that official merely politically powerful; he descends back down the road to his home spreading the word to all around him about the far greater power of Jesus.

There is salvation through the Word to those who believe. We all are weary travelers welcomed with open arms as the uphill road points us to the best home of all.

I am reading slowly through the words in the Book of John over the next year. Once a week, I will invite you to “come and see” what those words might mean as we explore His promises together.

Lyrics by Lori McKenna:

When the road under your feet is dark and feels wrong
And you find yourself lost and all your confidence gone
And the stars over your head through the clouds won’t be revealed
I’ll walk with you, even if it’s uphill

When the weight of your troubles send your knees into the dirt
And all your loyal distractions only magnify the hurt
When lonesome doesn’t quite define how so alone you feel
I’ll walk with you, even if it’s uphill

Hard times and landslides are part of life I know
Like they say, none of us get out alive
Whatever ocean you’re swimming across
However valley low
Whatever mountains you climb
I’ll walk with you, even if it’s uphill

Blessed are the times filled with sun, surrounded by your friends
Those days when all the new roads wait right where the old roads end
And should you wake up to Everest right outside your windowsill
I’ll walk with you even if it’s uphill

Hard times and landslides are part of life God knows
We all got some mountains to climb
Whatever ocean you’re swimming across
However valley low
I’m right here, I’ve been right here all this time
And I’ll walk with you, even if it’s uphill
I’ll walk with you, even if it’s uphill