Early one morning last week, I glanced out my kitchen window and noticed a mourning dove perched upon the fence.  He paused to look around, as if making sure no one was looking.  He hopped sideways down the fence a few quick steps and then disappeared into an effusion of jasmine.

Dainty yellow buds shivered and fell away to the ground as he rustled around in the thicket. A few seconds later, he popped back up onto the fence, tried to look nonchalant, spread his graceful wings and flew away.

A minute later he was back again.  This time I noticed he had a small twig in his beak.  Once again, he looked around to make sure no one was watching, and once again he plopped down into the jasmine.  After another round of rustling and rummaging, he hopped back up on the fence and was off. Again.

I watched him off and on throughout the morning. He must have made 30 trips back and forth to the jasmine, each time carrying a tiny twig.

Later that afternoon, my curiosity got the better of me.  I had to see what was going on, so I quietly crept down the driveway towards the jasmine to take a look.

This time of year the aroma of Carolina jasmine is so thick and sweet it makes your head hurt and so bright and pretty it makes your heart ache.  I stood on my tiptoes and carefully pulled back a long wayward leafy tendril.  There in the middle of a tangle of vines was a mama dove, almost the exact same shade of gray as the weathered wooden fence.  An eye, perfectly black and round,  stared back at me.  She made no move to send me away, but sat as silent and still as a stone.  I gently let the vine down, as though I were drawing a curtain, and left her to her privacy.

The next several days brought cold, razor sharp rain and whip cracking wind.  After the storms passed, I peeked in on my dove to see how she had fared.  I thought I might find an abandoned nest or worse.  But there she was.  Undaunted, she blinked the rain from her eyes and continued to sit patiently on her nest.  No amount of misery was going to separate her from her eggs.

I let down the vine and left her once again to the business of brooding. As I walked back up the driveway, my mind was filled with the pitiful image of her protecting her beloved eggs with her own body as rain pelted her head and the wind rattled her delicate home of twigs.

I would do the same.  The very same ancient and unseen thing that drives the mourning dove to suffer any discomfort, to bear any burden, to do whatever it takes to see her babies safely out of the nest… drives me too.

Over the weekend, I watched a documentary style news program where Alan Greenspan was waxing philosophic about our current economic condition.

Mr. Greenspan said that our nation didn’t become  great and prosperous because we had more resources than other nations. No, he said we became so great because we are smarter than everyone else.  Of course this is a paraphrase because I wasn’t watching television with a notepad and pen.

I think Mr. Greenspan is a super smart and awesome dude, but I must disagree with him on both points, although clearly America has produced some of the hardest working, most resourceful, best and brightest.

When I was in college, I took two semesters on the history of science and technology and I learned that while England and the Old World had skilled labor, their natural resources were depleted after thousands of years of civilization.  On the other hand, in the New World, we had more resources than we could shake a stick at, but not much in the way of skilled labor to take advantage of it.  So, I think Mr. Greenspan is wrong – we did,  and I think still do,  have more resources than other countries.  It’s anyone’s guess as to how long that will be true.

I also disagree with his point that we got where we are because we are smarter than other nations, and here, I will quote Lincoln who said it better than I ever could.

“But we have forgotten God. We have forgotten the gracious Hand which preserved us in peace, and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us; and we have vainly imagined, in the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own.”

~ Abraham Lincoln

Or wherein I alienate 90% of my readership.

About once a week I get an email asking me to sign and forward a petition to the president to reinstate school prayer.

And I promptly delete it.

This may come as a surprise to you because I am a Christian and I deeply believe in the power of prayer. I am in favor of prayer. Just not in public school.

The problems with nationally mandated school prayer are many, but I’ll address just the first few that come to mind.

I suppose first and foremost, I am a vehement believer in the separation of church and state.  I do not want to live in a theocracy.  Moreover, religion and prayer are matters of the heart and government mandates don’t change the heart. I don’t want the government imposing my prayers to my God on others and I don’t want the gods and prayers of others imposed on me.  Beyond that, is the sound of required prayers pleasing to the ears of God? I don’t know.

If prayer is so important to you, then YOU should be praying with your children before school. If you are a Christian, praying with your children is your job.  And really, don’t our public school teachers already have enough to do just trying to teach kids how to read and write without also having the mandate to pray with your kids too?  I think so.  Imagine if prayer in school was mandated how much time it would take to pray to each of the gods represented by the population of public school families? Even it if was just a watered down, catch-all global version to the goodness of the universe, why bother?  It just doesn’t make sense.

I think publicly funded schools should be for academics only. In my radical view, I question whether sports should be part of public schools, but that there is blasphemy in Texas.  (And there goes the rest of my readers).

Prayer is very important to our family. We think that prayer is direct communication with God, the creator of life and the universe. We think prayer is  a very holy and serious thing to do and that there is a good and proper way to undertake such a serious matter and frankly, we don’t want to abdicate that to someone with whom we may or may not share a like view of the world.

I do believe in the power of prayer to change the world. I don’t believe nationally mandated school prayer can.

This morning in church, we welcomed one of our congregation’s soldiers home from overseas.  Everyone stood and applauded to honor him.  What a joyous occasion it is when one of our soldiers returns safely home!  I am a big patriotic dork, but these kinds of things always bring tears up out of my crusty old heart to sting my wrinkly old eyes.

I can’t put my child to bed without thinking about all the soldiers overseas who do not get to tuck their babies into bed at night. Many of them are missing out on entire seasons of their children’s lives. The magnitude of that sacrifice overwhelms me as I look at my own child snuggled into his tiny bed, drifting off to sleep secure in the knowledge that his mommy and daddy are within the sound of his voice.

Every night since Sean was born, as I have tucked him into bed, I have prayed for our soldiers overseas. And now that Sean is older, he has made this part of his bedtime prayers as well.  Together we pray that God will watch over the children whose mommy or daddy is serving in the military far away from home and we ask that He provide them an extra measure of comfort. We pray that God will bring all of our soldiers safely home to their families.

Of course, we know that our prayers will not always be answered in the way we petition. We know that every soldier will not return home to those who love them.  And this pains me deeply.  I simply don’t understand why a God who can do anything wouldn’t do that.

But we continue our prayers anyway, knowing that sometimes praying does more for the one who prays than the one prayed for, knowing that God is at work in the world in ways we simply do not understand.  All I know to do is pray without ceasing as Scripture calls me to do and try to allow my faith to fill in the gaps where there is a dearth of understanding.

And to rejoice with tears and prayers of gratitude for every homecoming.

A couple of times a month, I’ll get an email from someone like myself, that is to say, someone of advanced maternal age. Antique. The writer is in her late 30s or early 40s and is pregnant for the first time and she is scared.  She wants to know if I was scared to be pregnant in my mid-40s and if so, how did I deal with it.

Experiencing pregnancy for the first time in the fourth decade of life is thrilling, and if you read too many books, terrifying.  So I did not read too many books.  But aside from being blissfully ignorant, I had other reasons to be joyfully confident.

The day I stood in my bathroom and saw that immediate and bright second pink line, I had an extremely strong sense that I had entered into some sort of covenant with God. Now, I’m not one of those people who get messages from God or has ever been clear on His will for my life. I’m just an average girl with an average faith, but this was a single moment of clarity.  I wish I could describe to you how it felt.  It was like an atomic blast of joy that endured throughout the entire pregnancy and remains in the sparkle and light of a funny little boy.

As many of you who have read my story know, I had been through several years of surgeries and infertility treatments only to be dismissed at the age of 41 as hopeless.  It took me three full years to accept the fact that I, and the best medical technology, were powerless to make this happen.  I simply could not accept my powerlessness.

But finally, three years later, I conceded. For my own well-being, lest I shrivel up into a bitter old raisin, I had to abandon this dream, I had to move on.  So I shook my fist at God and said, “Fine! You win! Have it your way!” And then I stomped off and enrolled in graduate school and scheduled a hysterectomy.  And it was shortly thereafter that I got the second pink line. I was already seven-weeks pregnant.

I have so often wondered if maybe because I am so stiff necked and so self-reliant, if maybe I had to be broken so completely, if maybe I had to yield my power so unconditionally –  to the point of seeking a hysterectomy — in order to make room in my heart for God to give me this incredible gift.  I don’t know.  I don’t pretend to know the mind of God.  I do know this:  He gives life, not me. I’m clear on that now.

I tell you all of this to say that, for me, I knew deep in my heart, somewhere beyond the realm of logic and words and statistics, that God would not bring me that far only to crush me.

And so I was filled with joy the entire pregnancy and I simply did not worry about the outcome.

I lived each day of my pregnancy with gratitude for this unexpected and undeserved gift that had been dropped into my lap when I wasn’t looking for it.  I now understood that I wasn’t in control of anything so I just laid around with my feet propped up like a big fat queen, watching A Baby Story and sobbing into my Saltines.

What would be, would be, and worrying about future sorrows would do nothing for today and certainly nothing for the little boy growing inside of me.

And so, I didn’t worry much. I trusted everything would be okay one way or another and if at some point I had to adjust the definition of okay, then I would see to that at the appointed time.

So if I have any advice for you, it is this:  Don’t read those books with all those scary statistics.  Information is not always power.  Put your feet up and rest your hands on your belly and appreciate this awesome gift that has dropped into your lap and remember this:

Joy crosses the placenta; take in as much as you can every day.

***

If you experienced a late-in-life pregnancy, I’d love to hear how you dealt with the fears and concerns that older moms have.  Any advice or encouragement you might offer would be great too! ~ AM

Why is it that churches need to put people in boxes? When Jesus spoke to and fed the crowd of 5,000, did he organize them into Youth, Singles, Young Professionals, Young Marrieds, Young Families, Pacesetters and Widowed and Divorced?

There’s a verse in Scripture that compares the body of the church to that of the human body, where all parts do their own thing but contribute to the wellness of the whole.  In our current church culture, generally all the Toes meet in room B3 and the Fingers meet in B4, neither benefiting from the wisdom and perspective of the other. And the idea of fingers and toes having their own meetings kind of cracks me up.

When I was widowed at 34, I eventually (re)turned to church to help me through the grieving process – not so much for spiritual healing, although that too was certainly needed, but merely as a way to force myself to get out and interact with other humans on the longest and loneliest day of the week.

What I found when I finally ventured back to church, now in my mid-30′s, unemployed, widowed and childless, was that I didn’t fit anywhere. I had no box. I didn’t fit into the singles group, where everyone was at least ten years younger than me. And I certainly I didn’t fit into the widowed and divorced group where most everyone was 30 years older than me with grown children and grandchildren.

Nothing changed after I remarried at 39. Antique Daddy and I didn’t fit into the Newly Marrieds group. Although we were newly married, we weren’t exactly young. And now even though we have a child, we don’t fit into the Young Families group either, because you know, we’re still not young. So we kind of roam around from church to church, class to class, bugging visiting people who are comfortably snuggled into their demographic box.

And while that may sound like a complaint, it actually isn’t. I don’t really want a box. I like being with people from all seasons in life. It’s more interesting. It’s kind of fun to make people squirm when you invade their box. It’s liberating to be box free! Down with boxes people!

I was appreciating my box-free existence a few Sunday’s ago. We were visiting a church and ended up in a Sunday school class with mostly older folks. When the teacher asked that the guests be introduced, an elderly gentleman stood up and introduced his daughter who was about my age. “Everyone, I’d like you meet Susan, my daughter,” he said proudly. Then he looked at his wife who was glaring up at him through squinted eyes – his cue to quickly correct himself. “I guess I should say this is our daughter.”

“I guess so,” she said dryly in her long-vowel’d Texas accent, “Since you were out eating a hamburger when I had her.”

Gotta love an old gal that speaks her mind.  See what I would have missed had I been in the Old People With Toddlers class?

Originally published November 2006.

A couple of readers, including my own husband, asked me if teaching Sean good manners was really  the TOP priority in my life.

Yes. Yes it is.

On the whole it would seem there would be other things at the top of that long list like trying to get him to eat vegetables or teaching him how to make coffee, but no, the most important thing I can teach him is to be a well mannered gentleman.

Why?  Because good manners make the world a nicer place.  Because I want Sean to be equally comfortable dining with a prince or a pauper.  Because good manners and the well written thank you note can take you a long way in life.  Because good manners are the mark of good breeding.

Those reasons are all true enough, but not the real reason.

The real reason that I am relentless in my quest to instill good manners in Sean is because it will be the single most important outward display of the faith that I hope he will one day choose to take on as his own.  Good manners are all about showing respect and consideration towards others and putting others first.  And that, more than anything else, will be his greatest testimony.

In my view, good manners are an expression of the core tenant of my faith, which is love thy neighbor.  Paul tells the Galatians that all of God’s law can be summed up in this one command — to love others as oneself.  As they say, love is a verb and that verb must be well mannered or it’s probably not love.

Well mannered people are not rude, self-seeking or easily angered. Scripture says that love is not rude, self-seeking or easily angered. Therefore, love is clothed in good manners.

So then, if you are a Christian and you are not using good and gentle manners and treating others with love and respect, and you are not teaching your children to do so, nothing else you are doing for the kingdom really matters, you are failing your faith. You simply cannot love God without acting loving and kindly towards others.  Paul writes in 1st Corinthians, “If I have a faith that can move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.”  Good manners and love for others are inextricably intertwined.  Love for others and love for God are inextricably intertwined.  Good manners can be absent of love, but love cannot be absent of good manners.

Do I always do it? No. I fail daily in some way. Sometimes I fail miserably right here on this blog.  Sometimes I fail my own family.  Other times I fail by omission, by not taking the opportunity to extend kindness or offer a word of encouragement.  And that is a shame because it costs nothing to be kind and respectful, to be well mannered.

So when I say that teaching Sean good manners is at the top of my priority list, it is.  And hopefully, in the process of teaching, the teacher will learn too.

On Sundays, I help out with the three-year-old class at my church.  I really enjoy it because there are not many things more funny or poignant than a three-year-old.

One of the things we do is hand out tiny New Testaments to each child and let them hold them and flip through the pages as we talk about how the Bible is divided into the New Testament and the Old Testament and about respecting the Bible as the word of God and how you shouldn’t literally chew on the word of God and that kind of thing.

As the teacher was going over this lesson, one little girl in the back held up her New Testament showing a picture of Jesus and squealed with excitement, “Hey! I found God! He’s right here in the back!”

If only it were that easy. Or maybe it is. I don’t know.

When Papa George mentions his oldest son George Bryant, he always tells how at age three, he could sing How Great Thou Art word for word. As he proudly tells this story, his eyes twinkle and his face fills with light.

In his far away look, I can tell it is George Bryant’s face that he sees. But in the next second, his eyes grow moist and his voice cracks with an ancient sorrow that is never put to rest. Papa George lost his little boy to leukemia before he was four-years-old. Fifty three years later, he still misses and grieves his little boy.

Last year, Memaw and Antique Daddy and Sean and I were all going somewhere in the car. Memaw and Sean were in the backseat. We were talking about how Sean loves seeing the garbage truck come pick up the trash. Memaw recalled how her oldest son, Billy Wayne, loved garbage trucks.

Her face filled with light and her voice sparkled as she recalled how he used to tell her that when he grew up, he wanted to be a garbage truck driver. “I told him that if he wanted to be garbage truck driver, I wanted him to be the best garbage truck driver he could be.” And in the next second, she began to softly weep. Memaw buried her oldest son in 1975. He was 27-years-old. Thirty-three years later, she still misses and grieves her little boy.

Yesterday I went to the funeral of my dear friend, Margaret. She was 58-years-old. I sat in the pew of this beautiful tiny Catholic church and watched her 87-year-old father, tired and hunched over with the burden of grief, walk slowly up the center aisle as the organ droned and the church ladies sang. I thought of how for all the remaining days of his life, he will miss and grieve his little girl.

I know that death teaches us about life, but what is to be learned when a parent buries a child?

There is a flaw in God’s divinely created universe. Parents ought not to have to bury their children.

Guest Post

by Cousin Tim

Recently, I took a trip to Indonesia and India to visit the work our congregation and my family have been involved in for many years. I intended only to visit an orphanage and return with a report to the congregation on how the work was progressing. I had not prepared to make any speeches or preach any sermons, but God had other plans.

A method of outreach in Indonesia is teaching English through Bible classes. At their request, I brought slides of a recent trip to Israel to show to the English classes. I did so for 3 classes over six hours and also participated for an hour on their radio outreach program.

Upon my arrival in India it was clear to me that I was not in control of anything. I had planned to simply be a polite visitor and observer. However, after 23 hours of preaching and teaching in classes, villages and churches, and delivering a different message to each one, I realized something that should have been clear from the beginning: Nothing I had planned was going according to my pre-conceived idea of my purpose for this trip. The true purpose of my trip would be revealed in a poor village of Southern India.

After a long day of teaching my hosts said that we would be traveling to yet another village to preach. When I asked who would be preaching, they said, “You are!” I asked myself how I could do it after such a long and tiring day and wondered how I could think of a relevant topic.

On the road to the village, I asked my hosts to describe some characteristics of the village. As I had noticed in Indonesia, in spite of my lack of preparation, Bible stories came to my mind which applied to each group I spoke to. In this case, the covenant between David and Jonathan and how it relates to God’s faithfulness came to my mind as the right application for this village, although I did not know why. I thought about Mephibosheth, the son of Jonathan, who had been crippled when dropped by his nurse. He had grown up in fear that David would try to kill him.

When we arrived in the village, it was dark except for the dim light of low-wattage bulbs. I sat in a chair that was provided for me and the villagers gathered around to hear a sermon from the visiting missionary. They were poor people who had worked all day and had made great effort to come hear me speak that evening, some walking long distances to get there. I felt a great burden to meet their expectations.

As I sat there pondering this burden, a young boy of about seven years of age came crawling out from the darkness. He crawled in front of me, pulled himself up fully and with deep, dark and sparkling eyes and a smile on his face, reached out his hand to shake mine. To say the least, I was very humbled. At that moment, I had not the slightest doubt Who was in charge. I sat back down in my chair in the shadow of the night and cried, hoping I would be able to preach.

I know now that it was the Holy Spirit who provided the scriptures and the application brought to life by Mephibosheth of old and Mephibosheth of the village, a young polio victim whose nickname was Noggin.

We went to many villages and I never grew weary or worried because the Holy Spirit prepared my heart to teach His Word with a message specifically fit for each village. God’s Word would accomplish what He intended. I was not in control.

This trip belonged to God.