Ding Dong

Posted on October 24, 2011 by Margaret

Those who have sharp brains can remember appointment dates, people’s names, and where they put things. A little mental bell rings, and the info quickly pops into their frontal lobes. My bell must be wrapped in a towel, because it’s often too muffled to hear.

Two weeks ago, my faithful old IBM computer tower died during multiple power outages. Even though it was a used, rebuilt office model, it had given us many years of service. Today a new tower is in place and working well.

Of course before we could let the old computer go, we needed to remove the hard drive and our personal information. I took the tower to my favorite techie who saved everything before disposing of it.

Right then is when my towel-wrapped mental bell began ringing, but of course I didn’t hear it. It wasn’t until after a week’s worth of muffled clanging that I woke with a start thinking, “My new CD is in the old tower!”

Having turned the house upside-down looking for a just-purchased Barbra Streisand CD, I finally remembered, but it was too late. When I called our tech guy, he told me the old tower was long gone. So the CD was lost, and I felt old and forgetful.

Mom used to have decorative napkins that said, “Old age isn’t for sissies,” and I’m beginning to appreciate that. I’m actually getting there faster than most with my muffled mental bell, because I know several 90-somethings who would have remembered to get the CD out of the tower.

All of us wonder about our futures, how long we’ll live, what health issues we’ll have, whether or not we’ll end up in nursing homes. Those are unknowns God will gradually reveal, bit by bit. One thing we know now, though, is that none of it will be easy.

I remember reading about a project in which high school kids were given geriatric characteristics: Vaselined glasses to blurr their vision; cotton balls in their ears to mute conversation; gloves to make it difficult to pick things up; weighted clothing to make walking laborious.

The kids were disbelieving, and they hadn’t even been given joint pain, diabetes, heart damage, or cancer. But studying how life is going to change for all of us if we live long enough should not inspire fear. Instead it should produce gratitude for what we have today.

We should also rejoice that God promises to be as fully available in our old age as he was in our youth. Although we experience subtle mini-losses every day, he never changes, never grows old, never tires and he never, ever has a loss.

I hope I can remember that when I’m pushing 100. Maybe I should burn it onto a CD.

“I will be your God throughout your lifetime—until your hair is white with age. I made you, and I will care for you.” (Isaiah 46:4)

Star of the Show

Posted on October 16, 2011 by Margaret

Young children soak up information like beach sand soaks up rain, taking it all in. And once in a while they come up with something that makes us scratch our heads and say, “Where did that come from?”

The other morning Skylar, my oldest grandchild (age 3) had come awake in her bedroom, so her daddy went in to greet her. He found her peeking through the blinds. “Daddy, it’s morning! I heard the sky putting the stars away.”

The mind of a child is a brilliant thing. But truth be told, our adult minds are astonishing, too. It’s just that our heads get so crowded with detail, creative thought often gets buried.

When God hears an original idea like Skylar’s, I imagine he smiles, pleased with what she said. She simplified a complicated concept and accepted it completely. Could we, too, please God with this kind of creative thinking? The biblical David tried, and succeeded:

Let the light of your face shine on us. (Ps. 4:6)
Keep me as the apple of your eye. (Ps. 17:8)
You, Lord, keep my lamp burning; my God turns my darkness into light. (Ps. 18:28)
Extol him who rides on the clouds. (Ps. 68:4)
You turned my wailing into dancing. (Ps. 30:11)
I thirst for you… in a dry and parched land where there is no water. (Ps. 63:1)
Apart from you I have no good thing. (Ps. 16:2)
Were I to speak and tell of your deeds, they would be too many to declare. (Ps. 40:5)

All of us can think about God, the ultimate original, and come up with fresh things to say about/to him. He demonstrates for us with an example. He says he had no beginning and will have no end, yet he calls himself the Alpha and Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end. (Revelation 22:13)

What does he mean?

I think he took the difficult concept of “no beginning” and “no ending” and gave it imagery we could grasp. In a sense, he was doing what Skylar did, wrapping logic around an illogical idea. Children have no trouble accepting the illogical wonder of God and his world, as long as they can cloak the ideas in logic as she did. The sky putting stars away? It makes perfect sense.

If we find ourselves stymied about God and what he’s done or not done, it might be good to reduce the problem to a simple, everyday picture. Maybe then we’d be able to understand (and accept) the uncertain and puzzling parts of life.

It worked for David.

It works for Skylar.

And it’ll work for us, too.

“He determines the number of the stars and calls them each by name. Great is our Lord and mighty in power; his understanding has no limit.” (Psalm 147:4-5)

Spiders on the Web

Posted on September 29, 2011 by Margaret

Every generation considers itself sharper than the one before. Since I see 3 generations coming behind me, I assume I’m “getting it” less and less. There’s one area where that’s indisputably true: the World Wide Web.

Recently three of my boys tried to explain to Mary and me what happens when someone researches a topic through Google. The two of us had initiated the discussion with questions about how the impossible occurs each time we Google anything. Literally millions of sites jump to the screen in seconds, and we wanted to know how.

The boys began describing the technical reasons behind this phenomenon, explaining why it wasn’t “the impossible” but was quite understandable. We asked question after question, but their answers were beyond our grasp. No matter how they tried to simplify it, we still couldn’t get it.

Mary said, “But who typed in all that information? Somewhere, at some time, someone had to put all those facts on the web.” The boys threw back their heads and laughed with gusto while Mary and I looked at each other’s blank faces and thought, “What’s funny about that?”

It was as if our two groups were talking different topics. Maybe we were. Adam patiently described the spiders that crawl around the web collecting data in a category requested through Google, completing their task in milliseconds, another nonsensical concept.

“Spiders?” we said. Mary and I are fully acquainted with real spiders in the real world, but these imaginary ones didn’t compute. But then, because the information they collect is real, they must somehow be real, too. It was mindboggling, and I’m fairly sure smoke began seeping from our ears at that point.

The root problem is that Mary and I think differently than the generation beneath us. It’s like pointing to a tree and asking what kind it is. One group might say, “A tree with red leaves,” the other, “Deciduous.”

I thought of the parallel between generational confusion and the confusion we sometimes feel in trying to understand God. In our bewilderment we ask him questions and he uses his Word to answer, but more often than not, we still don’t get it.

Sometimes we’re incapable of figuring it out, sometimes just off topic. We might be asking, “Lord, which retirement center should I choose?” while he’s answering, “My grace is sufficient for you.”

Much like Mary and me peppering the boys with sidebar questions, all of us are guilty of asking God the wrong questions, too, focusing on our expected answers rather than trying to understand his new ones. When God says something that seems off topic to us, we just repeat our question.

God does offer one answer, though, that answers every question, in every situation, both those we understand and those that confuse us:

“Just trust me.”

And because he’s God, we get that, no matter what generation we’re from.

“What they trust in is fragile; what they rely on is a spider’s web.” (Job 8:14)