Control
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“Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways acknowledge Him, and He will make your paths straight.” Proverbs 3:5-6
Post Thanksgiving ramblings from the Fischtank
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Not that it wasn’t great — just a little exhausting.
Last night, I was up until 4:30 helping my daughter write three essays for admission into graduate school. It reminded me of when she was in high school, and we used to pull a few of these all-nighters together doing her term papers. I hated those nights then; I cherish them now. Since I usually get up at 4:00 in the morning, I figure I lapped myself last night. These are the kinds of experiences you chalk up to the memory file and say, “I’m glad I had her around to do this.”
As you get older, you look back on how you raised your kids and see what you did well and what you did poorly. It’s amazing how forgiving they are. You would think that Chandler is a pretty lucky dude with all this wisdom and experience from an adult brother and sister on his side. It’s like having a chance to do it all over again with the perspective of years under your belt. You would think we’d have an easy time of this, experienced as we are in these things. Not so. I see myself making the same errors all over again. I’m smarter now — I can recognize what I am doing wrong — but the patterns are hard to shake. God is so patient with us.
The phone rings and it is Patience. Yes, that’s her name — the mother of one of Chandler’s friends. She needs to drop her two sons off in the morning an hour and a half before school and asked if we could watch them and take them to school with Chandler. “Of course” I say, because we do these things for each other. I happen to know these two br others are a terror together, but at 7:00 in the morning I hope the terrors will be minimal. We will need patience for this especially because Patience will be somewhere else. What a great name. I never say it without thinking about what patience really is.
Now as the day closes Chandler has an assignment for his class: to collect 10 autumn leaves and press them in a book until Monday. We go out with a flashlight and are surprised to find autumn leaves even in southern California. God colors the last of the season just as He colors the last of the day. His life is all around us.
Now got to get to bed early. Patience arrives at 7:00 with terrors of her own. Someone was really thinking when they gave her that name.
Gratitude
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“Keep your lives free from the love of money and be content with what you have, because God has said, ‘Never will I leave you; never will I forsake you.’” Hebrews 13:5
Of pepper trees and pedestals
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I knew when I interpreted yesterday’s tree illustration as a negative (the post holding the tree up was a “crutch”), that there also could be a positive bent to the metaphor. It depended on how you looked at it. And wouldn’t you know that my wife immediately connected with the positive side. I knew I was in trouble when I read her this morning’s Catch for the first time and she got all excited about the tree thinking the post was a part of itself. She was already imagining the post being Christ, or a spouse you become one with and how their support becomes a part of who you are.
So when she got to my interpretation of the post as a crutch, it was a major letdown.
This is pretty typical of us. For instance, I see dust as what humanity came from and will inevitably return to; Marti sees dust as something you sprinkle on people to make them do magical things like fly. (She actually broke her collarbone as a child jumping off her bunk bed after seeing Peter Pan for the first time. You’d think that abrupt collision with reality would have cured her fairy-dust optimism, but it didn’t dampen it in the slightest.)
If I were to be totally honest, I would have to tell you I like her interpretation better. In fact, it was the tree accepting our makeshift pedestal as part of itself that drew me to write about this in the first place. Not to say that the metaphor can’t go both ways. We just need to talk about one at a time. So today, I’m thinking about how a wooden 4X4 post that we cemented into the ground so it could hold up a sagging part of a tree is now a permanent part of this tree, and the tree will grow adjusting itself to the new footing as if our 4X4 were its own trunk.
Looking at it this way, the post is not a crutch, it is a new part of the tree, broadening its base and making more branches possible. When you think of the post becoming part of the tree, you get a picture of what happens when we are incorporated into the body of Christ: we become one with Him.
When we join with Christ, He makes us a part of His kingdom. He gets a stronger footing in the world because of us, and the truly amazing thing is that He sees us as part of Himself. We become attached to Him and tied to one another — all part of the same tree.
Thank You
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knee-Mail
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“The Lord has heard my cry for mercy; the Lord accepts my prayer.” Psalm 6:9
To Life
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by John Fischer
“We live in an often sad and baffling world. I remember my grandmother used to tell me never to look at the floor, only look up. Corteo is a show that looks up.” - Daniele Finzi Pasca, Creator and Director of Corteo, by Cirque Du Soleil.
Saturday night I was able to take my family to the circus. It seemed strangely appropriate after a full weekend of family and guests — some expected, some not expected. It was a little like a circus anyway, so to go to a professional circus seemed just right. This is where we pay people to celebrate the fantasy and folly of the ageless comedy we live called life.
But this was no ordinary circus. This was the traveling version of the Cirque Du Soleil — a dazzling array of light, sound, music and acrobatics. It is not just the amazing and the bizarre. It is a parade of humanity.
The program mentions the circus as caught somewhere between heaven and earth, boldness and fragility. My life seems a lot like that. Indeed, such a statement characterizes our holiday weekend fairly well. Our spirits are able to touch heaven while our bodies remain firmly planted here on earth, and for that reason we are both fragile and bold.
This weekend we touched on our fragility. We wondered about love. We felt conflict as old wounds surfaced. But we also felt bold as that love was reaffirmed and commitments were renewed. We are all so very different yet one family — unity in diversity — just like the circus.
This particular version of Cirque Du Soleil is about a clown who dies and sees his life before him. The clown is an angel who has lost his immortality. “Through a smile, a caress, or by teasingly thumbing his nose at us, he looks deep within our soul.” The clown celebrates what is both human and divine about us.
As I sat with my crazy family and looked up at impossible feats being accomplished by other members of my human family, I celebrated Christ who dangled in the middle for us, and became as sort of clown for our sakes, showing us what life is all about between heaven and earth.
I love my family. I love my Lord. I love this crazy thing called life, and I want to accomplish something amazing in it. I am sure my Choreographer wants me to, also, as I know He does, you.
Count your blessings
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Thanksgiving is a time of quiet reflection upon the past and an annual
reminder that God has, once again, been ever so faithful.
“The Lord is faithful to all His promises and loving toward all He has
made.”
Happy Thanksgiving, Take time to count your many blessings!
Baby Calf
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Thanksgiving
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Thank you for all you have given me and continue to provide for me. Most importantly, thank you for giving me eternal life through your crucifixion.
Praise be your name.
