Twelve Men

 

"Twelve men went to spy out Canaan," Victoria sang to the members of her family sitting around the campfire.  "Ten were bad," and then in a voice somewhere in between a shout and a shriek she sang "TEN WERE BAD!!!!"

As if to prove that this was no mistake, she sang this line of the song again in exactly the same way three more times -- each one to the increasingly loud giggles of her brothers and sister.

At two, Victoria is awfully cute when she sings and she can't be expected to remember all of the words to any song.  It is unfortunate though that she didn't remember that while ten of the spies were bad, two were good.

The song tells in simple language the story of how Moses sent twelve spies into the land of Palestine to search out the land.  Ten of the men came back with stories of the mighty men and cities that they would face and how the whole affair was hopeless.  Joshua and Caleb returned with a glowing message of how wonderful the land was and how God would give them victory.

Mark Antony, when giving his long speech about the recently killed Julius Caesar said "The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones.  So let it be with Caesar."  It is our human tendency to remember the darkest moments -- the defeats of the past rather than remembering brighter times.

We need to learn from the dark events of the past, but if those are the only things that we focus on then we are bound for despair.  We must remember as well the good times, the times when God brought us through the Red Sea, gave us water from the rock, and Manna from the sky.

It is those things that will keep our faith strong, those victories that will keep us from giving up.

Twelve men went to spy our Canaan.

Ten were bad.

But...

Two were good.

Apple Butter

Three Bushels of Apples.  Three Bushels of delectable, honey crisp apple seconds, complete with soft spots and other "defects."

I stood, paring knife in hand, whittling the core out of one.  "Yow know how many bushels Wayne's family got?"  Elaine asked me, as she poked at a kettle of simmering apples with a long metal spoon.

"Twelve bushels," I hazarded.  12 bushels sound like a lot of apples.  Four times as many as we had gotten and I had been paring the cores for quite awhile.

"No," Elaine replied and then distractedly said.  "Elliot, please give that to Victoria.  I'm sorry, Victoria, Mom's working on apples right now and they are really hot."  Our children somehow haven't figured out the meaning of the word 'share.'

"How many did they get?"  I asked.

"Oh, twenty bushels," Elaine told me breezily and then lifted a pot full of steaming apples off the stove.  "Anna, do you went to help turn?"

Twenty bushels seems like a lot.  Three bushels left us with 40 plus quarts of apple sauce and 14 quarts of apple pie filling.  At the end of it, Elaine took six quarts of the strained apples and put them in a crock pot with various spices and cooked them for the next eighteen hours.

This is apparently the new way to make Apple Butter.  It doesn't involve any fires or big black kettles, but at the end, you have an aromatic, tasty (if you like apple butter) substance that you can spread on a variety of gluten filled options.

A couple of years ago we had decided to make pear butter.  We had gotten a bushel of pears that weren't much good for eating and so we made pear sauce.  Then we did a crock pot recipe for pear butter.  The only thing was that it called for black licorice and when it was finally done, it was pretty much inedible.

Spending 18 hours in a slow cooker doesn't change the ingredients, it only intensifies their flavors.

I have heard it said that adversity doesn't build character, it reveals it.  The things that we did, the choices we made long before we ever got into those situations will decide the sort of person that is demonstrated when we are in the pressure cooker of life.

After eighteen hours, a pot of apples does not magically turn into a pot of kale, nor would a pot of black licorice laced pears turn into a lake of chocolate fondue after a similar period of time of cooking.    In the same way, the man I truly am will come out on the days when life is its most stressful.  Everything else is just a facade.

Apple Butter.

Pear Butter.

Kale Stew.

When stress comes to call, which one are you?

Name Tags

"Dad," my son Elliot asked me.  "Why don't you wear your name tag around?"

I stopped collecting the dirty plates from the table and thought for a little bit.  I have a name tag that I wear at the office.  It opens the back door there and lets me get around the hospital when I visit there, but I don't wear it around my home.

Of course, there is another reason that people wear name tags.  "Elliot, you already know my name without a name tag, don't you?"  I asked him.  "And more than that, my name tag doesn't say on it 'Dad,' but 'Dr. Waldron' and you don't call me that either."

Elliot pondered this for a little while.  "I still wish you'd wear your name tag here some times," he told me.

I've never particularly liked name tags.  They are the sort of things that gets used when you are with a large group of people who you don't know and who don't really know you.  At a medical convention, a tour group, or something else along those lines you have these tags that say something like,  "Hi, my name is:  John," and allow others to pretend a level of familiarity with you that they don't really have.

It strikes me that when we come to God in prayer we don't wear name tags.  I don't typically even identify myself to Him.  God knows my name without my telling Him.  He is familiar with my struggles and my strengths and weaknesses better than I am.

More than that, God doesn't wear a name tag either.  Of course, He could.  It would say something like "God of the Universe," or "Jehovah Jireh," or something equally impressive that would let me know how important He is and how I shouldn't waste His time with trivialities.  All of that would be reasonable for Him to do, but He doesn't.

Instead, He gives me permission to call Him Abba Father and to talk as long as I want to.  Its not because of who I am, but because of who He is and His great love for me that I can come to Him in this way.

Because when there is relationship, you just don't need a name tag any more.

Just a Little Light

Darkness has settled over portions of this country.

Hurricanes Irma and Maria hit Puerto Rico, leaving devastation in their wake.  Harvey set up shop over Houston and wrecked havoc on that city.  Now, this week, a gun man opened fire on a crowd in Las Vegas, causing the deaths of over fifty people.  On the other side of the Pacific, North Korea is rattling its missiles.  Nate is brewing in the Gulf of Mexico.

It is easy to feel abandoned and forsaken in a time like this.

One of my patients told me that she had to stop watching the news because she couldn't sleep afterward after seeing so much chaos and evil.  I understood completely.

Humans are never blinded by the light, only by the darkness.

I like to take pictures and there are many things that make up a good photo -- a pretty subject, leading lines, and good composition among them, but one thing is necessary for any photo, light.  You can't take a picture of a black cat in a coal mine at midnight and have it turn out, however nice your camera and lens may be.

At the same time, even on the darkest of nights, there are lights to be seen, twinkling through the atmosphere.  Last night, the Harvest Moon floated, shining above the landscape.  Even in the solar eclipse, we look, not at the darkness hiding the sun, but at the rim of light surrounding the moon.

The prophet Jeremiah lived through and saw some horrific things as he saw his people devastated and his culture almost destroyed by the Babylonians.  In the midst of this, he penned a book of poetry called Lamentations, weeping over the loss of Jerusalem.  These are some of the saddest words in the Bible.

Then, in the exact center of this tiny book, come these words "The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases; His mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness."

We will see what we look for.  If we are looking for the shadows, we will see them, for they are there all around us, but if we are looking for God's light, we can find it too, even in the darkest place.

So I pray that we may have our eyes opened -- not to see the darkness more clearly, but to see the light.