Summer Theater, Winter's Tale by Wil Triggs

There’s a drama going on in our yards, and I’m not talking cicadas. The curtain goes up and the sun shines down like a spotlight on some amazing performances.
 
A just-picked tomato, fully ripened on the vine in the back yard. Add a bit of salt. Don’t leave it on the counter to sit at room temperature. Just eat it. Like an apple or plum. The meaty warmth, the tangy sweetness balanced with the pinch of salt.
 
The English pea. Pull its little zipper to open its jacket and the peas spill out magically. Put them in the simmering water and when they rise to the top, they are done. Add your favorite herb if you like. Let their heat melt a bit of butter. Sweet jewels of the earth.
 
Just weeks ago, they were seeds, little ones you could barely make out as they fled your hands free-falling onto the burrow of earth that then covered them like sleeping bags and tents keeping the kids warm in their backyard sleepover. Rain comes, then sun, a spotlight on the stage, shining on them, time to act, don’t forget your lines or the blocking. Again, and again. Here they are today—lettuce leaves, brilliant greens with hints of yellow green and a streak of burgundy that suggests blood but is nothing really, just a touch of color to fill your salad bowl, a canvas on which you can paint other colors—carrot, tomato, parsley, pepper.
 
What are the little black dots I rush by as I mow the grass? When I’m done, I go over to investigate. Black currants in two places. These new hedges are not big enough to bear much. Tiny blackberries in another. Their canes quite old, many years hidden in the shade growth of a makeshift meadow. They hide in cool and verdant shade. These few fruits release their juices and natural pectin with the help of a little sugar and a bit of flame. No need to worry about canning; there’s just enough here for a piece of toast—here today, gone tomorrow.
 
Last week a friend gifted us with an onion from his garden. Better than Vidalia, he said. We took it home and added it to the evening chowder of summer corn, tomato, potato. No tears upon cutting it. The onion was sweeter than you could imagine.
 
The leeks have a long way to go. They aren’t even as thick as a number two pencil at this point. But they will thicken with time. Something to look forward to in the fall or even the winter. They’ll stay alive even through snow and ice, heartier than I could ever be, but I have only to wait. Maybe I’ll harvest on my birthday week in December, and we’ll have one of them in our potato leek soup. This is something worth waiting for.
 
God routinely takes a little seed and transforms it into whatever, a bunch of lettuce you can trim leaf by leaf and it keeps giving more. A little seed, dirt, rain, sun. Voilà. There are so many varieties, more than we could ever imagine . . . a vine of cucumbers, multi-colored radishes. Think of the crazy vine of tomatoes that tastes like nature’s candy, carrots in the many colors of Joseph’s coat, just-picked beans filled with natural flavor, so many shapes and colors. What’s God going to come up with next?
 
What about people?
 
The dead of winter, people stand frozen, like statues of hate and sin, lost. Maybe these are people I don’t like. People I can’t stand. People not like you and me. People who think they’re better. Maybe they are and that’s why I don’t like them. People I know are worse than I am. I might want to act like weeds, choking out new little sprouts or blocking the sun when the little sapling is just getting started.
 
I need to find refuge from those misguided thoughts. Repent. It’s hard to tell what a seed is going to be when it’s just a seed. We need to have faith that growth and change and hope is all around us because it is God who is doing the work in people even more so than what’s happening in my backyard garden.
 
Perhaps the Lord of the harvest wants to use us as part of the dirt, sun, water regimen that transforms from seed to plant to amazing harvest. What can we say? What might we do to be a part of the theater of transformation God is producing and directing as we plant, water and weed in the solstice of his ever-loving Son. He will surprise us as he uses us, transforms us, as he grows and changes the garden of his goodness and life that’s all around us, a tragedy that becomes a comedy, a stone statue in the garden come to flesh-and-blood life.
 
Like Hermione . . . 
You gods, look down 
And from your sacred vials pour your graces 
Upon my daughter's head! (Winter's Tale Act 5, scene 3)
 
Oh, taste and see that the Lord is good! Blessed is the man who takes refuge in him! (Psalm 34:8)

No Thank You by Lorraine Triggs

In their quest to expand our childish palates, our parents established the “No, thank you” portion rule that we followed when guests at other people’s homes. The guiding principle behind the rule was unfailing politeness. If an unfamiliar dish was passed to us, or worse, a familiar dish that bore no resemblance to the real thing, we were to take a very small portion to taste, without the drama of gagging, spitting or commenting. That was it. If the host passed the dish again, we were allowed to say, “No, thank you” and keep passing the dish to the left. Even when a host was insistent that we have “seconds,” we could stand our ground. “Oh, no, thank you.” 

The good news is that I’ve put away my childish palate. The bad news is that I deleted the comma. In the theology of grammar, my plate is now full of no thank you portions. These portions are the bits and pieces of my life that I never wanted and didn’t ask God for, so if you don’t mind, thanks, but no thanks—really no thanks.

It’s tempting to take the easy way out and blame these so-called dark days for my thanklessness, but that wouldn’t be fair to the dark days. I discovered that unlike revenge which is said to be a dish best served cold, no thanks portions are best served cold, hot, warm, room temperature. It doesn't matter with this a steady diet that feeds my memory of all things gone awry, and my forgetfulness of God’s steadfast love and faithfulness.

It's time for a change in diet, one that feeds on words sweeter than honey, words of life and beauty, words that David wrote in Psalm 31:21, 22: “Blessed be the Lord, for he has wondrously shown his steadfast love to me when I was in a besieged city. I had said in my alarm, ‘I am cut off from your sight.’ But you heard the voice of my pleas for mercy when I cried to you for help.”

I practically choke on the no-thanks portion stuck in my heart. David was thanking God in the besieged city. Perhaps the real miracle isn’t the rescue from attacks, but the wondrous steadfast love of the Lord that shows up—not on the other side of the city or in a different place altogether—but right there in the alarm, in the pain and in the trouble, and transforms thanklessness into thankfulness.

Lately, I’ve been so focused on the no thank portions in my life, that I have forgotten another portion which David described in Psalm 16:5: “the Lord is my chosen portion and my cup; you hold my lot.” A cup that overflows as goodness and mercy follow me all the way to a feast, where the host welcomes me "no more a stranger or a guest, but like a child at home."

I'll have seconds on that. And thirds.

Knowing Father by Wil Triggs

My dad grew up on a corn farm in the heartland. His was not a wealthy farm, but things got worse with  the Great Depression when the banker in Allen, Nebraska, skipped town with the savings of most everyone. When that happened, it would be an understatement to say that the banker let down the family and the community at large. Decades later my dad told me the men of the town took out after him to do colorful things to him that I cannot use in a church publication. They never found him.

I don’t know how my grandparents managed to keep the land as long as they did, but one thing I know from the stories my dad told, farming was hard work—hours of work before breakfast, followed by more hours of work for as long as the sun allowed. There were so many variables to a good season. Pests, this summer think cicadas. Enough rain, but not too much at once, and he saw his share of twisters. And the market price of corn could make or break a good harvest.

Dad was in the middle of his family in birth order. He watched older siblings make choices about what to do once they reached young adulthood. None of them stayed on the farm. They left the middle of the country to try to find their fortunes elsewhere. The hard winters likely are what in part drove Dad to head west instead of east. Another factor was one of his oldest brothers falling for a woman whose great-niece turned out to be the woman he would marry, my mom. 

Some of the brothers settled along the coast of California. My dad and mom in Santa Barbara, and then by the time I was born, Long Beach. Uncle Vern and Aunt Ardean in Ventura. Vern was younger than my dad, just the right age to serve in World War II, something from which he never quite recovered. 

Now that I’ve lived more of my life in the Midwest than on the West Coast, I fully appreciate their choice, especially in the time they did it. There was no smog back then, no freeways. Communities of newly built homes were just farmlands of citrus fruit or almonds or avocados. Imagining what it must have been like, I’m sensing something Edenic. I was once on a farm in Ukraine in the summer, and I felt as if I was back home in the California, cherry valley of my childhood, eating sun-warm sweet cherries right from the tree.

My dad didn’t have to deal with snow, and farm work was not what he wanted to do either. Both he and my mom were hard workers and instilled that in their kids. We learned to work hard no matter the task. So, he gave himself heartily to whatever he was hired to do. Uncle Vern fled Ventura to own a service station in a town on the road to Las Vegas. This town consisted of his service station, a restaurant and a few rooms to rent for the night.

California wasn’t the only place my dad’s family moved—and the family scattered. My own siblings eventually scattered as well. So, when one of my sisters moved to Connecticut, we drove across the country to see her. We would stop along the way at relatives. Washington, Wyoming, Nebraska, Iowa.. Dad took his Super-8 camera and filmed the journeys.

So many of their stories got lost along the way. They didn’t talk about the past much. I didn’t experience most of what I’ve written about here, so these fragments are all I have. So much of Dad’s life happened before I was born—how to know him?

My older siblings experienced life as a church-going family. I never did. There was a church that was dubbed “our church,” but we rarely went there. Something had happened to make them stop. It could have been recovery from an injury that stopped him going. I don't know.

My dad loved his family. He especially loved babies. I can still see him at one of our family gatherings. No shirt. Brown pants held up by suspenders and the baby in his arm like a bag of groceries—this was a supremely happy moment for him.

When I was in early grade school, we all learned that he had a disease for which there was no cure.  He was older than my mom, and I was the youngest of their six kids, so by the time I came along, two thirds of his life was behind him. Our relationship was forged in that final third, when he figured out that he wasn’t going to strike it rich, when he became housebound and needed help just to breathe or to move from room to room, when he realized that he was dying. Dad died in 1980. It was my care for him as he moved toward his own death that brought us together and enabled me to love and serve him.

It’s been a long time since I’ve seen Dad.

The paternal drive doesn’t have to be lived out only with our physical progeny. So, here’s to the brothers, uncles, neighbors, pastors, Christian friends who give themselves to those without dads.

All the more remarkable is the Fatherhood of God. My dad went across the country to escape hardship and to meet, marry and care for Mom. God traveled through eternity into incarnation to make his enemies his children. He comes when we least deserve him. Consider Jesus, the true father of us all and how he described himself in the Gospel of John.  
“I am the bread of life.”
“I am the light of the world.”
“I am the door of the sheep.”
“I am the good shepherd.”
“I am the resurrection and the life.”
“I am the way, the truth and the life.”
“I am the true vine.”

As I grow older, the actions and realities of my own dad fade, but the fatherly love of the Triune God grows more real. His ever-present care reflects in the “I am” piercing my soul, opening my blind eyes, warming my heart.

It is Christ’s care for us as he moved toward his own death and truly died, rose and ascended. This is what brings us together and enables me to love and serve him—to know him as the best and ultimate Father, making every day a different kind of Father’s Day.

Memories of my dad fade with time. He is one I will never forget in whole, but particulars, seem farther and farther away. 

Jesus, on the other hand, I see him more and more. I see him in the way God uses unexpected people to do surprising things. I see him in the deathbed room of my best friend. He shows up in Kindergarten for all to see. Sometimes you can even find him in church service, in the songs, the word, the prayers, the people sitting beside you. When I’m enjoying a meal with a friend, Jesus is right there at the table with us. As I write and rewrite even this, he’s here with me watching, reading, clinging to every word like a loving father would. When the enemies come to us, in places like Nigeria or North Korea or in warring Russia and Ukraine,  he takes the hands of his children, he lifts them up on his shoulders and walks so they never have to take another step on their own ever again.

Garden Tours by Lorraine Triggs

Even though I’ve never met her, I want Dana Smith as my next new best friend. My friend Dana wrote this in the New York Times on May 23, “Last Saturday, I was covered in dirt, my back ached, the scream of a trillion cicadas rang in my ears, and, despite my best efforts, a sunburn was developing on the back of my neck. I was in heaven.” She was writing about why gardening is so good for people.

I am right there with you, friend, save those trillion cicadas. My garden, any garden is heavenly. Dana pointed out what fellow gardeners know—gardening is good for your physical and mental well-being. Even a stroll through the Growing Place or Hacker’s or Heinz Greenhouse is good for my mental health.

There are other gardens that we need to linger in for the sake of our souls.

First is the original garden, the one God planted in Eden, in the east, where he put the man whom he had formed (see Gen. 2:8). I do wonder about our first parents’ gardening skills, or more accurately their listening skills, as the garden God designed became the backdrop for humanity’s fall into sin.

English poet John Milton described this fall in the opening lines of Paradise Lost: Book 1:

Of Mans First Disobedience, and the Fruit
Of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal tast
Brought Death into the World, and all our woe,
With loss of Eden, till one greater Man
Restore us, and regain the blissful Seat,

In this loss of Eden, however, is the promise of other gardens to come. We hear it in “the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day,” (Gen. 3:8) calling and seeking newly lost humanity. We see it in God’s words to the serpent about Eve’s offspring: “he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel. (Gen 3:15) and we see the promise in God’s covering of Adam and Eve.

That first promised garden to come is Gethsemane, and the promise unfolds at night against a backdrop of a supper, of bread and wine, of betrayal and denial, of sorrow even to death and sleep. Milton’s greater Man, Scripture’s Second Adam, does what the first Adam did not do in paradise, and in a broken, bleak garden, he says, “Yet not what I will, but what you will.” (Mark 14:36) And the blows begin to rain down on the serpent’s head.

Then comes a garden by a tomb, where one could be excused for looking for a serpent, who perhaps did deliver a fatal blow. But Mary Magdalene wasn’t looking for a serpent, she was looking for her dearly loved Savior who wasn’t in the tomb. And in that beautiful ironic way of Scripture, who should come to her, but a gardener, walking in the cool of the morning, calling Mary’s name, dispelling any lingering serpents and sending Mary on her way to the disciples.

The last garden is the garden we linger in now. The garden where we still pull weeds of jealousy, selfish ambition, boasting and false idols, but with wise garden advice, we can sow love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness and gentleness. Reaping a harvest of righteousness until the first Eden gives way and all creation is restored.

Before the Wonder by Wil Triggs

I’ve been looking at what people said to Jesus before his miracles, and then I put some of those alongside the cares of my own days and the news and happenings of the world. So here is a psalm for today.
  
Is it bunnies or squirrels eating up my veg?
Will Ukraine send missiles beyond borders edge?
“Master, we’ve worked hard all night and haven’t caught a thing.”
Before the wonder stands the question, the fear,
The Lovingkind is ever near.
 
Is that noise in the car new or the old one’s last breath?
What do we make of Iran’s presidential death?
“If you are willing, you can make me clean.”
Before the wonder stands the question, the fear,
The Lovingkind is ever near.
 
How loud will these cicadas get?
What happened on that Singapore jet?
“Lord,” he said, “my servant lies at home paralyzed, suffering terribly.” 
Before the wonder stands the question, the fear,
The Lovingkind is ever near.

Will the booklet maker work today?
What sly-fox things will politicians say?
“What do you want with us, Son of God?” they shouted. “Have you come here to torture us before the appointed time?”
Before the wonder stands the question, the fear,
The Lovingkind is ever near.

Why does this herb tea taste like soap?
Amid the mudslide PNG loses hope.
“Lord, I do not deserve to have you come under my roof. But just say the word, and my servant will be healed. For I myself am a man under authority, with soldiers under me. I tell this one, ‘Go,’ and he goes; and that one, ‘Come,’ and he comes. I say to my servant, ‘Do this,’ and he does it.” 
Before the wonder stands the question, the fear,
The Lovingkind is ever near.
 
What’s with this cough? When will it be gone?
China holds military drills near Taiwan.
“Jesus, Master, have pity on us!”
Before the wonder stands the question, the fear,
The Lovingkind is ever near.
 
Palestinian flags fly with the White House near.
Summer Kick Off is almost here.
“Where could we get enough bread in this remote place to feed such a crowd?” 
Before the wonder stands the question, the fear,
The Lovingkind is ever near.
 
Will people come to book group this week?
North Korea Christians in secret still seek.
“Lord,” Martha said to Jesus, “if you had been here, my brother would not have died. But I know that even now God will give you whatever you ask.”
Before the wonder stands the question, the fear,
The Lovingkind is ever near.
 
Air raid. Cities bombed across Ukraine.
Thinking of today's events, what about the rain?
“Lord, have mercy on my son,” he said. “He has seizures and is suffering greatly. He often falls into the fire or into the water. I brought him to your disciples, but they could not heal him.” 
Before the wonder stands the question, the fear,
The Lovingkind is ever near.
 
I’d forgotten how much I like this Celtic song.
Human rights on trial in Hong Kong
“Lord,” they answered, “we want our sight.”
Before the wonder stands the question, the fear,
The Lovingkind is ever near.
 
Claire is gone. We have no words to speak.
The pastors in Irpin, what are they doing this week?
“This is a remote place, and it’s already getting late. Send the crowds away, so they can go to the villages and buy themselves some food.” 
Before the wonder stands the question, the fear,
The Lovingkind is ever near.

Sun Exposure by Lorraine Triggs

Growing up, I had a love-hate relationship with the sun. The sun was my mother’s cure-all for headaches and head colds. Take your book outside and sit in the sunshine and read. You’ll feel better, and I did. However, I was the kid who wore a long sleeve shirt to the beach and was allergic to the sun, which produced a mild skin rash that I decoratively coated with Calamine lotion. Calamine lotion gave way to Coppertone, but unfortunately, my Coppertone tan did burn, and I went back to Calamine lotion and long sleeve shirts at the beach.

I am not the only one with this love-hate relationship. It seems as if all of Australia does, too. I read an article in Atlantic Monthly by Rowan Jacobsen, “Against Sunscreen Absolutism,” and he wrote that a 1980s ad campaign “advised Australians to ‘Slip, Slop, Slap’ if you had to go out in the sun, slip on a shirt, slop on some sunscreen, and slap on a hat. The only safe amount of sun was none at all.” In 2023, Australian public health groups issued new advice “that takes into account, for the first time, of the sun’s positive contributions.”

One long-known contribution is that “sun exposure triggers vitamin D production in the skin,” and as Jacobsen points out that low levels of vitamin D are associated with increased rates of stroke, heart attack, diabetes and other diseases.

So naturally, people turned to daily supplements of vitamin D—all the benefits but none of the risks of the sun. Turns out that “Sunlight in a pill has turned out to be a spectacular failure: Vitamin D supplements have shown no benefits,” wrote Jacobsen. The article details specifics how exposure to the sun actually helps prevent and alleviate many autoimmune diseases.

Jacobsen concludes that “It’s not every day that science discovers a free and readily accessible intervention that might improve the health of so many people.”

This non-scientific person hates to break it to the scientific community that it didn’t discover this free and readily accessible intervention. The Creator spoke it into existence, along with the moon and stars, who talk back and proclaim his glory through all the earth, to the end of the world. Talk about readily accessible.

Next is the word “intervention.” From Old Testament prophets to aged Zechariah in Luke 1—from before the foundation of the world—intervention had been planned and promised, “the sunrise shall visit us from on high to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace.” (Luke 1:78-79)

It’s the intervention we sing at Christmas, and should be singing year-round:
Hail! the heav'n-born Prince of peace!
Hail! the Son of Righteousness!
Light and life to all he brings
Risen with healing in his wings
Mild he lays his glory by
Born that man no more may die:
Born to raise the sons of earth
Born to give them second birth.

Those Australian researchers did overlook one hazard to prolonged exposure to the sun—one upside-down, counter-culture hazard that only exposure to the Son of Righteousness and his Word brings to reborn sons and daughters of earth, who now walk as children of light, in all that is good, right and true.

Exposure to this son is high risk. The rays from this eternal light can and will change us, mark us in ways that can never go back. What he does can and will mark us and change our lives forever. May it be so today in all we think and say and do.

Lookalikes by Wil Triggs

My first trip to the Soviet Union was a long time ago. We travelled only to Moscow and Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg). The Cold War was set on chill and, while on that trip, an international incident turned the dial to freeze.

Tourists were kept apart from ordinary people. We stayed in separate hotels, shopped in special stores reserved for outsiders. The agency, Intourist, was the group that spied on us, we joked. Maybe it wasn’t so much as keeping an eye on us as it was to make sure we were safe and had the most positive impression possible of the USSR’s great cities and liberating history. But when needed, muscles could be flexed. Our group was assigned our own guide, but it soon became clear that our tourist group was actually two smallish groups combined.

The group was made up of a group of Jews from the East Coast and a group of us Christians from the Midwest. Both our groups were there to visit “friends,” Jews or Christians in their synagogues or churches. We compared notes of what the Jews and the Christians we met said about living in a place where neither of the groups were welcomed or felt they belonged even though it was their country of birth. We posed with one another for photos.

I stood next to one of the men and our hair color was the same (brown), our beards the same length and we were the same height, our eyes, too, were the same color. “You look like you could be brothers,” another person commented.

A few weeks after we got home, I attended a human rights rally for Christians and Jews for the ministry where I served. Because of the people we traveled with, I felt comfortable. I put out our newsletters that told stories of Christians in jails, prisons and hospitals in the Gulag.

People stopped at my display. I would talk to them about the prisoners in the newsletter and invite people to sign up to pray with us. Some people did.

Because one the “friends” I met with while in the Soviet Union had been arrested and was awaiting trial shortly after we left, I was especially worked up. The thought of a brother in Christ who had me into his home for dinner, fellowship and prayer now incarcerated—that was almost more than I could bear. I wasn’t sleeping too well some nights. I told people about him. I continued talking about Christians. I wanted people to join me in praying and taking whatever action to get him out.

“Why don’t you just admit it?” one of the listeners asked.

“What? Admit what?”

“That you’re Jewish.”

“What?”

“Anyone can see that you’re a Jew.”

“No. I’m not. Look at my literature. It’s all about Christians. I’m a Christian.”

“What are you ashamed of? The least you could do is acknowledge it.”

I could easily reply with a negative—I’m not Jewish—but I couldn’t easily give a counter explanation. English, Scottish, Welsh, Dutch, Choctaw, Cherokee, Irish. Maybe all the above. Neither of my parents were only one thing, and no one knew for sure. My mom used to jokingly say she was Heinz 57. This was not a condiment in our house. I didn’t know what that even meant for the longest time. But I was pretty sure I was one hundred percent Goy.

When Grace, my mother-in-law-to-be, first met me, we hugged and she said to Lorraine and me, “You look more like my son of David than Lorraine does my daughter of Sarah.” We smiled and I hugged her. “You’re not the first person to tell me that,” I said.

Grace was born and raised in an Orthodox Jewish family and came to faith in Christ after she and Lorraine’s Finnish dad were married.

So, she immediately felt at home with me. And I, of course, loved her because she was Lorraine’s mom, and she was so welcoming and accepting. It wasn’t really how I looked, but who I loved that made the difference. I loved her daughter, so I immediately had my second mom.

Lorraine recently heard people talking about what Jesus looks like, how no one knows, but people keep trying to paint him the way they look. Imagine if we actually did know. It’s so much folly. The Jesus height. The Jesus hair color. The Jesus diet. The Jesus workout. This is the way we humans would approach being like him—looking like him, trying to match his physicality or his taste in whatever.

Jesus knows his sheep. Like Grace, he sees ways that we look like him. He sees the resemblance before we do. We can’t see it. Maybe we shouldn’t. So often we look in the wrong places.

“Oh, I can’t get over how much you’re like your Dad.”

We have only to be guided by him now that we are his. We have only to accept by faith that we look like and can live like our Shepherd Father, the Son. It's not  our hair or eye color or height or weight or complexion of clothes. We are his from the inside out. I want to be his lookalike inside, not to try making him look like me.

By the power of the Spirit, we can be Jesus to the people around us. May we find ourselves saying things that are more Jesus than us, surprising ourselves, and doing the deeds of the holy one of God. It’s going to be a Jesus Saturday today.

And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another. For this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit.
2 Corinthians 3:18

Joyful Noises by Lorraine Triggs

Forest bathing has given way to sound bathing according to the Theosophical Society’s electronic billboard for those who pass by on Geneva Road. Personally, it has something to do with mosquitoes and mud that would make sound bathing a preferable choice over forest bathing for me.

And if I were to experience sound bathing, I’d prefer a California beach to the no-man’s land of unincorporated Wheaton, or is it Carol Stream? I know my husband, Wil, would prefer that. Even though he is a thoroughly established Midwestern by now, he will always miss the ocean and beaches he grew up with.

Let’s say that Wil and I are at one of his favorite beaches—Sunset Beach, ready to start our sound bathing session (costing anywhere from $35 for a group to $300 for an individual session). We’re to follow our instincts, stand if we feel like standing, lie down, whatever. This sound bath is to cleanse our souls and restore our balance—all from the immense power of sound and vibration that emanates from Tibetan singing bowls, crystal singing bowls, tuning forks, chimes and gongs. There’s even a digital option for those who want their sound bath "to go".

Oddly enough, creation is quiet during sound bathing. No waves crashing or seagulls crying or sandpipers piping—only sound vibrations from instruments that, frankly, after a while, would make me tense.

On a recent early morning dog walk, my husband unintentionally had a sound bath of sorts. His ear buds weren't charged so he couldn't bathe himself in David Suchet reading the daily Bible reading plan over the phone app. Instead, Wil’s sound bath involved actual sounds such as chirping birds, the hum of traffic on County Farm Rd and the distant clack, clack, clack of a freight train—the actual sounds of the rhythms of everyday life.

Creation is anything but silent in Scriptures. Read Psalm 148. Sun, moon, shining stars? Praising the Lord. Sea creatures and all deeps? Praising the Lord. Fire and hail, snow and mist, stormy wind? Fulfilling his word and praising the Lord. Mountains, hills, fruit trees? Praising the Lord. If the psalmist lived in the Prairie State, cicadas? Praising the Lord.

Ours is a noisy faith, a joyful noisy community of faith. It’s the joyful noise of serving 30 or so kindergarteners who talk to each other all at the same time, or the joyful noise of middle school students as they get ready to go on retreat. It’s the noise of laughter and tears, the noise of prayers for ourselves and each other. It’s the beautiful yearning in our voices as we sing:

O Lord have mercy on us.
Have mercy on us, O Son of David.
O Lord have mercy on us.
O let our eyes be opened, O Son of David.
Have mercy on us, O Lord.
 
Above all this joyful noise is the one voice that spoke in the beginning, that was in the beginning with God, that calls us by name and invites us to walk in green pastures. It’s this voice we know, we follow and we love, because he cleanses our sins and restores our souls.