Aspects of Amaryllis

Ice and Ministry

On Christmas Day we had a wintry mix of rain and lots of snow, and then numbing cold. So the streets froze solid in a washboard style, or more like cross-country skiing -- each side street has two deep ruts to drive in, and if you meet a car you have to jump out of the rut and go to the side so it can pass. It has been this way for a month now. Today it is raining, and the ruts are getting a little shallower, but there are still inches of street ice near every sidewalk entrance to the church.

I put on my rain gear and went out a bit ago to see what I could do. I chopped ice, I scooped ice, I threw around the water. It feels good to work physically sometimes, even though my right arm doesn't work quite like it used to. I scooped and chopped, and then I noticed that water was running right in to fill where the ice had been. When it freezes tonight it will freeze solid, and nothing will have changed.

I thought, "Well, this is a lot like ministry. You chop, you scoop, you try to make a safe path for folks, you try to make a difference, and sometimes the water just rushes right back in and freezes solid again." So often you can't see that anything was accomplished at all except a sore shoulder and wet feet.

But it is the work I do, that I love to do, and people voluntarily give money to the church in part to pay me for it (the ministry, not the ice-chopping,) so apparently it is deemed necessary.

Of course I must mention that a layperson happened by and grabbed a shovel to help. We kept saying to one another, "You should go in. You shouldn't be doing this. We aren't getting anywhere." But we kept at it for half an hour or so, catching up on various things as we worked. Finally, soaked and a little sore, we quit, and put the shovels away.

And that's sort of how it all is, really.

Como Conservatory in January

Lovely trip to Como Conservatory this afternoon, but I wasn't really thrilled with the pictures. Anyway, here are a few:

The conversation goes on...

This morning I was talking to a friend. I was telling him how hard it is to believe he is dead. "I keep thinking I can just pick up the phone, or drive over and visit you," I said.

He smiled his familiar grin and said, "You are talking to me right now, aren't you?"

Then my alarm went off, and I woke up.

Minneapolis Sculpture Garden in January

This isn't in black and white -- just looks like it. See the cherry in the middle there?

























Now you can see the red. I had just a few minutes in-between meetings so I packed my wide-angle lens.
















There is a cool reflective piece of art in the garden, all frosted over right now.

Technical Difficulties

Well, I haven't put much on my blog lately. I haven't been able to upload any pictures -- I used up all my allotted free space. So I've upgraded my space and perhaps soon I can display some Christmas pictures.

Meanwhile, it's been a lovely Christmas.

Christmas Poem, 2009

"I tell you, if these were silent
the stones would shout out."
-- Jesus, in Luke 19:40

But they were singing
at the beginning, too,

vibrating in the silent
space between atoms,

the groans of creation joining
with one woman's voice,

a cry we may yet hear
in the moment after sound.
-- Michelle M. Hargrave, 2009

Children's Christmas Program

My eldest was Herod this morning. He was a little uncomfortable with the notorious role, but he knew his lines and said them clearly, and got to wear a great costume.

Theo opted out. Last week while he was crying and I was trying to convince him to go to rehearsal (he was supposed to dress as an angel and say, "A savior" on cue) he said to me, "Momma, I need more space than that." Well, he's right, he does need more space than the whole program would have allowed, and there is hardly any chance he would have said what he was supposed to when he was supposed to. He did, this morning, indicate that perhaps next year he'll be in the program.

Well. I've seen these programs for years. We do this every Christmas. Every year the kids are cute, every year some forget their lines, every year weird things go wrong and are delightful. This year, though, I nearly cried through the whole thing. I don't think it was because I had one kid in it, and one kid not. I just found it so moving, all these people working so hard for the children to tell us this story about a little baby, again.

Prompting dilemmas

Yesterday afternoon I had tea with a friend and then went to a shopping center at County Road C and Snelling to Once Upon a Child to sell size 5 boy clothes. I went back to my car, pulled out of my spot and thought, "Which way shall I exit the shopping center?" I used to work on C-2 so I sometimes drive out of my way north to that road to make an easy right-hand turn onto Snelling, an easy shot home. It is more direct, however, and shorter, to take the frontage road to the stoplight and turn left onto C and then right onto Snelling. Last time that way was full of traffic, but it was earlier, about 4 pm, and still light. I paused a moment, sitting there, and then drove out of my way, north to C-2 and onto Snelling.

A few hours later my mother-in-law called and breathlessly said to me, "Where is everybody?"

"We are all sitting down at dinner," I replied. "Why?"

She told me of a seven car pileup at the intersection of C and Snelling (she had just returned from the grocery store there) with fatalities, and she knew I was planning to go there sometime during the day. She said the accident was at 4 pm and I said, "I was just through that intersection at 4. I must have just missed it."

Kelly and I have had several near misses the last few days.

A few hours later I checked my facebook page and saw that two women I know were planning to drive through that intersection at 4 and were late or made a stop instead. We started musing about it all when I decided to check the news report. I learned there the accident wasn't just at the intersection. Someone had a "major medical event" and plowed a mini-van into a line of cars on the east-bound lane of County Road C waiting at the Snelling light. One woman died, one is critically injured, and seven cars were involved. This happened about 4 pm.

That is the road I decided not to take yesterday afternoon, that little stretch of road going eastbound to Snelling on County Road C. At 4 pm.

So a prayer of thanks goes up for another near miss (how many do we have each day?) and a prayer for all those injured or grieving because of that accident. But here is my dilemma:

How did I know to go to other way? or was it a lucky guess?

I teach people in Covenant Discipleship to pay attention to spiritual promptings, and it seems to me that the more we pay attention to them the more we get. They are often things like, "Call so and so" and then you find out they were thinking of you or needed a call right then or things like that. Or a prompting is a suggestion (by the Holy Spirit) to do this instead of that. A little dose of spiritual wisdom and a nudge from God to do the right thing.

But does God send us nudges to go this way or that when someone is having a major medical event and may careen into our old vehicle, trapped in rush hour traffic on a suburban road?

Theologically this does not make sense to me. But it is how I experience the world. I always know before I have an accident, I mean hours beforehand. Kelly does too. I always know whom I will marry the moment I meet them (well, both times that happened.)

Theologically there is a problem here because I can't imagine God goes around saving some people and not others. So do some of us get the message and others not? (Some might argue salvation is like that. But I don't buy it.) I don't think God is that involved in the little and large details of our lives ("here's a parking space. Don't take that road.) And yet I have these experiences, often enough that I can't ignore them.

Just yesterday afternoon Kelly and I were musing over this sort of thing. He had an event (I should let him tell it) of knowing something just before it happened, an odd but not useful happening. We joked about how this happens to us -- like we see or hear something before it actually happens -- but it never includes stock tips.

But premonitions now, we have those. So does God send us little notes and nudges all day long? Or does time bend? Or is this all the same thing? Is this all just random free will that we read meaning into later?

And what words of comfort are there for all those who are caught in the wrong lane of traffic, and how will I feel if I don't get the warning first sometime?

Sunday off

I took this weekend off. I didn't take all my vacation last year and figured it out too late, so this time I sat down with my calendar and thought, "Hmm. When will I be tired?" and blocked off the first Sunday of Advent, Valentine's Sunday, and some appropriate family vacation time. I didn't know then that I would spend the week before this break with the burial and memorial service of a friend and colleague, and how tired I would be right now. Nor did I know my mother-in-law would ask to take the boys for the weekend to see her sister in Iowa. Nor did I know I would spend much of it very, very, sick.

But a break it is, and we did some Christmas shopping (nearly finished) and saw Devotchka and Leo Kottke and have had some quiet time together in the house. I have propped myself up on the couch and watched whatever _I_ wanted to watch, without negotiating with my eldest son.

But Sunday morning off , especially living inches from the church, is weird. I used to be able to skip church all together, but I haven't been able to for the last year or so. Part of the Covenant Discipleship expectation (I'm in one of our several groups here at Fairmount) is that we attend worship if able. Maybe that is working on me. Or maybe I just know I need to worship once in awhile, even though it is hard to turn off the what-can-I-learn-today part of hearing someone else preach. So I woke up this morning, here next door to church, and had to figure out where to go.

I ended up at House of Hope Presbyterian on Summit. It's a big steeple church, elegant, gorgeous, formal. The music was stunning. We had communion (seated, with the elements distributed one at a time.) I couldn't see the preacher -- he was in the preaching nest and I was, late, seated behind a pillar. But it was a solid, thoughtful, pastoral reflection on the apocalyptic texts of Advent I usually struggle to address myself. And I got to be moved by worship without worrying about pulling myself together for the next part of the service.

My boys are on the road home now -- I miss them terribly-- and I have Advent candles for us to light together. And I still have (barring a funeral in the next few days) two days off to laze about or prepare for the season. Happy first Sunday of Advent.