Digging by Cheryce Berg

Cheryce first posted this on her blog, Hope and Be:Longing, which she describes as "stories of hope, belonging and longing."

I’m out back behind the shed, sitting on a pile of dirt. I did a snake check before I sat, not that there ever are snakes but there was one, once, in my garage, and if I were him this back corner of the yard is where I’d take a morning nap. And I don’t want to be the one to wake him up.

I’m between a tipped over wheelbarrow, two lime green kayaks, a log pile half un-covered, a pale garden hose, an empty trailer, and a cracked black tarp. I’m feeling out of sorts back here, thinking I might organize it differently, or at all. If you even can organize that place behind the shed, maybe freshen it up a bit.

I’m not a gardener and I don’t pretend to be, which is obvious if you take a peek at what I’m doing. Repotting sideways pale plants from my kitchen windowsill who are dying a slow death because they were trying to survive while tipped over in their too-big pots with barely enough dirt covering their roots to be modest. And if they weren’t cacti to start with they’d be long gone.

But I’m not mired by the dirt and disorder and dying cacti because the morning June sun shines brightly on my face as I dig with my spade, and I pause to look up and pray.

I’m thirsty for prayer, to focus the eyes of my heart away from the dirt and up to the light. My heart carries the news of more than one friend who is facing her own pile of dirt behind the shed, filled with scraps and weeds and things tipped over. Messy, broken, lonely pain in so many lives—it all gets poured out before the Lord Jesus as I sit here in the dirt.

I pray for the mamas whose hearts are breaking, whose children are aching and chasing after the wind. I pray for the wives whose tears go unseen, whose weariness runs deep. I pray for the lonely who wish they were wives or mamas and aren’t.

I pray for these friends who may have lost sight of hope, that the sun would break through and shine on them, too, out back on their own piles of dirt. That they, too, would feel the morning breeze, the breath of their Creator, on their cheeks and look up instead of down at the mess and mire underneath them.

I trudge back inside, carrying my newly repotted cacti who gaze up at me, hopeful. And I dig some more, this time at my kitchen table and into the Psalms, to find words of hope now to revive my friends.

I read Psalm 18:19, “He brought me out into a broad place; he rescued me, because he delighted in me.” And in the same Psalm, verse 28, “For it is you who light my lamp; the Lord my God lightens my darkness.”

And I dig out this hope and repot it in my words, that I might use it to encourage my friends when I have the chance. I glance out the window again at the shed and the sun, and notice I can’t see the pile of dirt from here at my kitchen table while digging up hope in the Psalms.

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Thanks for the Memories by Pat Cirrincione

The Cubs won the World Series last fall, and I cried tears of joy, exhilaration and sadness. Yes, sadness. My dad and I were huge Cub fans, and although I was really happy to see them win, I was sad that he was no longer here to share the excitement with me.

My dad was my hero. He was a World War ll veteran, an ex-medic in the Army. He had the gentlest touch in the world. If I fell, cut or accidentally burned myself while baking, the only one who I allowed to take care of me was Dad. He could clean a wound, bandage a cut or place salve on a burn with a feather's touch.

Dad was the one who taught me how to throw a baseball (hard ball, not soft), hit a ball, catch a ball and field a ball. He taught me how to roller skate, ice skate, go sledding and throw a mean snowball. I’m afraid as the oldest child, and the only girl with all boy cousins, he taught me that if a boy could do those things, so could his daughter.

I loved wearing blue jeans and gym shoes, not frilly dresses my mom longed to see me wear. One year at Christmas my mom and grandmother decided to buy me a walking, talking doll. One look at it on Christmas morning and I burst into tears. Where was the bat, ball and catcher's mitt I had requested of Santa. Santa was obviously not listening, and that poor doll never came out of its box until my younger sister was born.

Dad taught me to ice skate in a pair of his old racing skates, and my joy in the winter was running home from school, grabbing those skates and cajoling my younger brother into going to the flooded park that freezing weather had turned into a great skating rink.

Dad also taught me how to fish. I had my own wooden pole. I never could put a worm on the hook, much to his dismay. As I got older, and femininity took over, my love for sports never waned. He and I never missed an opening day at Wrigley Field. Those were the days. You could go down to the front row and even talk to the players while they were practicing. And tradition dictated that you never left the ball park without eating at least one hot dog, a box of Cracker Jacks, an ice cream bar and peanuts.

Dad and I not only went to Cubs games; we even went to see the White Sox, the Black Hawks and the Bears. We watched the Bulls on TV. He had the patience to teach me the intricacies of each sport—from RBIs, to hat tricks, to first downs, to the zone. Those were the best of times.

And if you think it was only about sports, it wasn’t. My dad loved musical theater and fancied himself a crooner like Bing Crosby. He taught me ballroom dancing and to love old and new musicals and all the music from his and Mom’s time. I especially fell in love with Tommy Dorsey, Frank Sinatra, Benny Goodman (to name a few) and many others of that wonderful big band music era.

Our favorite movie to watch together was “An Affair to Remember,” starring Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr. Cary Grant could say a million words without speaking . . . the story and feelings all in his eyes. And how we cried each time Cary discovered that Deborah Kerr had been crippled in a terrible accident the night they were to meet at the top of the Empire State Building.

Above all, Dad taught me that God was the one to turn to when times were tough—and there were many of those growing up in a family where hand-me-downs were the norm and sometimes not enough money for the groceries we needed. But there was always plenty of love of family. His most-quoted saying was: “Always treat others the way you would want to be treated, even if that other person is not very nice to you.” He practiced this each day of his life.

Such are the memories. My dad, my hero. My confidant, my mentor. The love of my mother’s life, and he hers. I miss them both every day, but am blessed that the Lord chose to place me in their lives, and I in theirs. Thanks for the memories, Dad!

Left the Faith by Lorraine Triggs

Through a series of emails and Facebook posts, my oldest sister connected with a second cousin from my mother's side of the family.

"I grew up hearing stories of how your mother left the faith," cousin Rebecca emailed. What? My mother left the faith? Not so fast, newly found cousin. My mother loved and followed Jesus from the first day she trusted him at age 40 till the day she entered his presence at age 92.

My cousin had a different take on my mother. Raised an Orthodox Jew, my mother left her faith when she married my father who was a Gentile; becoming an authentic Christian ten years later made little or no difference to my mother's family.

It was strange to hear my mother described as someone who had left the faith and that got me thinking about that phrase—left the faith.

From a global perspective, we rightly use that term to describe Muslims who choose to follow Jesus. The downside to leaving one's faith is alienation, persecution and death as these believers know so well.

From a personal perspective, our faces become somber, our voices hushed as we announce the sentence of death when we say that someone has, "left the faith." We wag our heads, ready to write off the person—all hope is gone; there's nothing we can do to bring them back to the fold. Is this the way my mother's family thought of her? Discouraged and weary, we close the door and walk away from the person who walked away from the faith.

First things first. God has already announced the death sentence on all we like sheep who have gone astray (sounds a lot like leaving the faith to me). Then, in an amazing display of grace, he goes after the lost sheep to bring it back to the fold. He is that straying sheep's only hope of rescue.

That ought to give us hope for straying sons (mine among them), daughters, brothers, sisters, parents, spouses, cousins and friends. Their salvation doesn't depend on us or what we did or didn't do. If we couldn't save ourselves, we surely can't save anyone else. The sheep walks away from the shepherd, but the shepherd follows, ever seeking to rescue the sheep.

As much as we would like to close the door and walk away from our beloved stray sheep, we might not have that option. God's kindness compels us to keep the door open, his grace nudges us to pull the sheep from the thicket (again and again) and his loving providence reminds us that salvation belongs to him alone.

For all those people we know and love who have left the faith, let's constantly and gently remind them that the door remains open and the path home is a straight line to Jesus.

Shaping Sacred Space by Rachel Rim

A few days ago, while skimming through old files on my laptop, I came across one simply titled with the name of a friend. Opening it, I realized it was a powerpoint I’d created several years ago in an effort to more intentionally pray for this non-Christian friend. Some sections had prayers written on a nearly daily basis, other sections skipped weeks between prayers, but by the time the powerpoint fully loaded, there were more than a hundred slides of prayers spanning the last four years.

God has yet to answer any of these prayers. He has yet to answer many people’s prayers—the ones for sick loved ones, wayward children, unfulfilling vocations—and it only takes a cursory glance at the news to see he has yet to answer all (or even most) of our prayers for our nation or for peace abroad. Sometimes the silence of God in the face of our pleading is more than we can take; there’s a reason my powerpoint has long gaps in between. There is a peculiar and powerful kind of grief to praying for something over and over and over again with no measurable answer.

I’ve been thinking a lot about hospitality after finding that powerpoint. It’s one of those words we’ve managed to sterilize, and what is left intact is a mildly pleasant and generally risk-free image of inviting someone over for dinner. While there’s nothing wrong with cooking dinner for someone—a shared meal can be a powerful avenue through which true hospitality might occur—I think it’s far from encapsulating the actual meaning of the word. The Greek etymon for hospitality is xenia, and if you’ve read any Homer, you know that welcoming the stranger formed a vital part of ancient Greek culture. The epics are wrought with instances of hospitality, usually involving kings welcoming disguised characters into their homes for refreshment, storytelling and song.

I think there’s something profound about this inclusion of storytelling and song—it shows that hospitality is not simply offering physical nourishment but allowing someone to bring their stranger-ness to the table, so to speak, and partake in it with them. That’s what I understand hospitality to be: the host creating a space in which the guest enters in and the two then radically engage in intentional communion—giving and receiving, speaking and listening, self and other. The goal is not domination nor assimilation but generous participation. Henri Nouwen says it like this in his book Reaching Out:

Our society seems to be increasingly full of fearful, defensive, aggressive people anxiously clinging to their property and inclined to look at their surrounding world with suspicion . . . But still—that is our vocation: to convert the hostis into a hospes, the enemy into a guest and to create the free and fearless space where brotherhood and sisterhood can be formed and fully experienced.

I’m beginning to think of prayer—the words themselves—as an act of hospitality. Each of those hundred slides on my computer is not simply a petition to God but an intentional space where the fullness of who I am can meet the fullness of my friend—even if I am meeting her in her absence. It is my attempt to play the host, offering words that close the physical distance between us, that hospitalize the wounds caused by our fragile humanness, that tenderize the sometimes polarizing rhetoric (“non-Christian,” “unbeliever”), and leaves us as simply human. It’s creating openness to remind myself of who God is and who God knows my friend to be, and of all he has done and can do with the emptiness we lay before him.

In a Madeline L’Engle book, a daughter asks her mother why she prays if praying doesn’t always produce results. Her mom answers that we pray because prayer is an act of love. I don’t know if my friend will ever accept the gospel. I don’t know if any of your prayers will have the outcomes you hope for. I hope she does, and I hope they do. I ache with the hope of it. But I am reminded today that perhaps prayer is more about its shape than its results, more about what it gives than what it asks. If prayer is an invitation into a sacred and creative space, toward hospitalizing the stranger, whether that be a beloved person or a turbulent nation, then surely it is worth praying anyway. God knows we could use more acts of love.

A Familiar Tune by Heather

Heather is a worker in a hard-to-reach place.

Last Sunday night the four of us went to see our friend’s daughter perform at a violin concert. Her teacher, who performs with the Hanoi Symphony Orchestra, hosted the event for his students. He introduced each one adding a few words of praise and encouragement.

When the first-year violins screeched on a high note or faltered over a forgotten measure, the teacher was the first to applaud them at the end. One of the students, a seven-year-old, tripped over a few difficult notes and froze in the middle of her piece. Without hesitating, the instructor picked up his own violin and began playing from where she left off. The student followed his lead until he lowered his violin, and she finished the piece on her own.

I’ve been thinking about that moment all afternoon.

Sometimes when we sit down to pen these letters, we feel a pressure to communicate how well we have performed our work. Our minds and hearts are always drawn toward a subtle idolatry of self. We turn life and ministry into a performance, and put ourselves in the spotlight. I was convicted of this as I stared at the blank text box anxiously wondering what to write.

I didn’t want to admit that I’ve been tired these past few months. I took on too many responsibilities this year and have scrambled to keep my commitments. I’m dragging to the end of this school year just glad to finish and trying not to worry whether I’ve finished well. I feel like the poor first-year violin student who stumbled and stalled and needed her teacher.

Thankfully, we do have a gentle teacher who is watchful and who knows exactly how the music should be played. When we make mistakes and lose track of the melody, he leads us forward by playing the familiar but momentarily forgotten tune.

I’ve been reading First and Second Corinthians in recent weeks and came across this today, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness” (2 Cor. 12:9). The violin student’s flawed performance unexpectedly revealed her teacher’s kindness and skill.

In the same way, our failures are sometimes the crack through which the blinding light of God’s grace and goodness and perfection shine. In 2 Corinthians, Paul continues, “Therefore, I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me.”

While it seems odd to send newsletters about our insufficiency, I will do so with Paul in hopes that you can hear the sweet, familiar tune of the gospel and catch a glimpse of the One who plays it perfectly. May we be reminded together that the grace of God is sufficient when our own strength fails and that the glory of Christ is revealed in our weakness.

Mistaken Identity by Lorraine Triggs

"You look Russian," our missionary friend Cindy assured me as we climbed up the stairs from a Metro station near Red Square. "Just don't smile." It was 1993—still the early years of the fall of communism—and we were headed to two different protest rallies on opposite sides of Red Square. We had heard news about the two events on the same day that Russia's Parliament was trying to remove the president and go back to the way things were.

One was a pro-communist rally; the other a pro-democracy rally. All this on my first trip to Moscow. For someone who apsired in some ways to journalism, this was a dream come true. Some missionaries were afraid and were staying huddled in their apartments. We, perhaps stupidly, wanted to run right to the rallies where the news was, where history was happening.

Okay, I look Russian and I won't smile, I told myself as we arrived at the pro-communist rally first. I thought about the woman on the tram earlier in our trip who started talking to me in Russian. As long as I stayed mute, I could be mistaken for a Russian citizen.

The first rally was eerily silent. Protestors were mainly pensioners in dark winter coats and Russian hats. No one talked or milled about. The red and gold hammer and sickle flag was carried by more than one protestor. Men wore military medals on their coats. There weren't thousands of people, but they were all standing as if in formation, facing a lone man who was shouting his anti-deomcracry speech through a portable speaker.

We walked behind the protestors without a word, on our way to the other rally. We reached a street where we saw a row of Russian soldiers on horseback, Moscow police, police cars and whole bank of ambulances. They were primed for violence.

"Oh, look," Cindy said, "Lorraine's jacket is the exact color of the new Russian flag." The blue color was not welcome in this all-red rally where people were angry and longing for a return to the past. And Cindy was right--the blue of my jacket was the exact shade of blue on the new flag.

So would those people think I was Russian, but the wrong kind of Russian?

Thank you very much, Cindy. I just wanted to get safely by the pro-Soviet soldiers and the armed police. Why do you think I wasn't smiling or talking. Fine with me if you mistake me for a Russian citizen and not an American.

We crossed Red Square, quiet and pensive. When we finally reached the pro-democracy rally, nothing could have been more different. For starters, the crowd was huge and milled about, talking and laughing. No people in formation or angry speeches screamed. There were children with their parents, students and all people of all ages. Ice cream vendors were selling ice cream. Street musicians were playing music. Jugglers. It was like a carnival. I breathed a sigh of relief that I could smile and talk again, and shake off my mistaken identity.

I felt free to be myself.

And I think in some ways, the same feeling was true at that time for a lot of other people coming out of the spell of the Soviet Union. They weren't Communists anymore. They weren't Soviet. Some could whisper a confession of identity, like the dear friend who travelled with us and whispered that her mother was a Jew, something she could not openly admit for years. I hugged her because we shared that same heritage with our mothers. Finally, she could admit who she was. But more important than that bond was the most important bond: we were both followers of Jesus Christ.

It's a little bittersweet to look back at this point with all that's happening with Russia and Ukraine and America and the rest of the world.

The danger with mistaken identities is believing that they are the real deal. We can even fall for it ourselves. We can define ourselves by our politics, the bloggers we follow or don't follow, our successes or failures. It's so easy to let those little bits define us—our genetics, our politics, our careers, skin color, gender, academic studies, bank accounts, the cars we drive; there are so many ways for us to create mistaken identities. Those things are not who we really are. 

Think about the Apostle Peter on what was probably the worse night of his life—his denial of Jesus. Try as he might, there was no mistaken identity for Peter as he huddled around the fire. A servant girl and two other people knew that Peter had been with Jesus. 

Being with Jesus is what defined Peter, even at his lowest point, even when, scared, he denied it. And it is what needs to define us as children of God at our lowest or highest points. Let's work at letting people see us for who we really are, and let's be who we are—children of the living God, which is the very best identity that any of us could aspire to.

As Mothers Love by Wallace Alcorn

My mother was, I suppose it could be put, an ordinary woman. She never graduated from high school (indeed, never allowed to do so), and she had no profession or trade or even what might have been considered an occupation—unless it was housewife and mother of two boys.

Her father wouldn’t allow her to attend the Milwaukee’s Girls Technical High School longer than what it took to learn to cook and sew, and then she had to go out and work until she had her own family to care for. (This did not, however, keep her from becoming the academic advocate for her younger sisters who did graduate.) She dropped out of the workforce to raise her boys and returned to help in the war effort, and then continued so she could pay her boys’ college tuitions.

Mom was ordinary in the sense of being-in-the-order-of motherness. One of her sisters told me, “Your mother is one bundle of love,” which is pretty good coming from a kid sister. 

  She was of a background where you restrained direct expressions of love to children lest they get big headed or become spoiled. You just love (active verb here), and they’ll know. But every now and then someone would tell me with understanding amusement that Mom would say, “I never graduated from high school, but both my sons are Ph.D.s!”

When I tried to tell her I loved her, she would give me a gentle shove and mutter, “Oh, go on now.”

She came to worry I had become a professional student and would never marry. Once, while ironing my shirts, she looked at me and said softly but most earnestly, “Wallace, I hope you marry a girl who will let me love her.”

Not, mind you: “whom I can love” or “who will love me”—but “who will let me love her.” That Mom would love whomever I marry was never an issue. This determined love was born within her about the time I was, and she nurtured it within for twenty-eight years until it finally burst out as confession, which I took as mandate precisely because I loved her. The least I could do was to present her with a daughter to love.

When I found Ann Carmichael, I arranged with a friend to buy rings and send them by air express to me in a Grand Rapids seminary. My father returned from work to find my mother packing an overnight bag, and he asked where she was going. Without pausing or looking up, she said, “To meet my new daughter.” She had scooped up the rings and was going to deliver them to me herself.

I asked Mom to stay out of sight long enough for me to put the engagement ring on Ann’s finger—and then present her to Mom as her new daughter. It was love, sight unseen and unquestioned. I didn’t meet Ann’s mum (like Ann, British-born) until after we were married, because she had left her parents in Ghana in order to finish high school in Florida. I later learned that she had assured her mum that I would be a good husband “because he is so sweet to his mother.” Of course.

The last time I saw Mom was in an Indiana hospital. Both our daughter and my nephew’s wife were expecting babies, and Mom had been looking forward to the arrivals of two great-grandchildren. But she knew this would be it.

With contented joy, she let go and said, “Tell the little ones I love them.”

Be Strange by Lorraine Triggs

My mother delighted my sisters and me with her creative spin on the English language. By far, the expression we loved the best and repeated the most was "Shut the rain, the windows are coming in." She would shout this to us whenever a summer storm blew in. We dutiful daughters would then run through the house and close the windows.

The runner-up to "shut the rain, the windows are coming in" happened one evening as we said good-bye to company who had come for dinner. At my mother's house, guests neither arrived nor departed without a fuss being made over them, and that evening was no different. As our family friends walked down the front walk, my mother called out, "Be strange!" (a rather loose translation of "Don't be a stranger.")

For weeks on end, her dutiful daughters repeated to each other, "Be strange," as if any of us needed encouragement in that direction. 

Actually, my mother had no idea that she had uttered a profound biblical truth. She didn't have time for heady talk about a Scripture passage. If the Word said to practice hospitality, then she would do just that. It didn't matter who you were or what you did for a living, the door to our home was open. In retrospect, I am sure we entertained angels disguised as strangers.

That brings us back to the profound truth that as followers of Jesus we are strangers in this world, but we don't treat other people as strangers. We love them. And that's strange, especially in our insular society and partisan world.

Our band of followers includes the likes of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob who "acknowledged that that they were strangers and exiles on earth" (see Hebrews 11:13) and being strangers who didn't realize that they were paid an amazing compliment, "of whom the world was not worthy." (Hebrews 11:38)

The Apostles and church fathers didn't have time to squawk about first ammendment rights or call a center for law and justice to defend them. Those things didn't exist back then. They were preoccuppied with faithfully following Jesus, taking the gospel to all nations, ending up hiding in caves or being sawed in two, telling a jailer about Jesus or praying to be faithful when they faced the jaws of a lion or a gladiator's sword. 

We are a "peculiar people." (1 Peter 2:9, KJV) We are not a voting bloc or cultural movement or naysayers. We are more than that. We are followers of Jesus, who had "nowhere to lay his head." We are strangers en route to a better country.

So to quote my mother who has been in that better country for a few years, "Be strange."