O my God, some of Your children love to sing loud in church, and I’m one of them. While we know You’re not hard of hearing, we’re glad You’re not nervous, either.
Nailing the high note
What? … OMG, maybe the people in the pews in front of us are?
Earplugs, please.
Some elementary classmates considered choir cruel and unusual punishment. Not me. Although stuck in the back row because of my height, I didn’t permit boys’ cooties to lessen my joy in music. I grew up singing.
As an adult, I directed my church choir. We developed spiritual closeness and musical mental telepathy … that didn’t transfer to sitting/standing together. I’ve never seen another choir do the wave every Sunday. Still, we sang with gladness and authenticity.
After moving, my husband and I joined a large church with a bigger choir and classically trained director. How I missed old friends! But now I didn’t direct while belting out alto and/or tenor to compensate for members lost to the flu du jour. I sang my natural soprano!
However, our director discovered my past. Would I substitute for him? I attempted the game all God’s people, beginning with Moses, play: Ask Somebody Else.
Other directors weren’t available.
The director believed in miracles. He also promised his compassionate pianist would cover my back.
O-kay.
What to wear? Often, seams split and zippers opened as I conducted. In the past, arm motion sent shoulder pads traveling. Once, I appeared to grow a bust on my back.
Wardrobe decided, I caught cold. While I directed, would God send an angel to wipe my nose?
What if singers didn’t show? Without them, I was only a crazy woman waving her arms.
They came, though. A row of Bach’s descendants gave me the eye.
We practiced well, but questions erupted about missing music, standing up, sitting down …
“Only God is infinite.” I answered. “Ask Him!”
When I stepped up to direct, congregational eyebrows rose. But it wasn’t about me. Or anyone else.
We worshipped an audience of One: Jesus. All who lifted heartfelt praises to Christ belonged.
In His choir, nobody has cooties.
Your Extraordinary Ordinary: How do you deal with feelings of inadequacy?
Jesus, thank You for brave pastors who preach to cranky congregations the day we spring forward. Because, OMG, if I were a minister, I’d be tempted to refuse until every member had consumed at least two espressos and a giant jelly doughnut.
Image by Günter from Pixabay.
Image by Wikimedia Images from Pixabay.
Do your holidays cooperate? Occasionally, Christmas thumbs its Rudolph-red nose at me. Sometimes, though, it’s simply different.
In 1958, my family celebrated Christmas in our Mexican mission compound with a bare-limbed, thorny bush.
We dogmatic preschoolers protested, “That’s not a Christmas tree!”
With spun-glass angel hair, that odd, but lovely tree and borrowed Nativity introduced a different celebration. Hot-air balloons and fireworks lit the nights. Instead of dime-store trinkets, I received a wooden doll bed made by our handyman. My nine-months-pregnant mother, while sewing baby blankets, made doll versions from scraps. We ate weird sweets. We watched village children scramble for candy showered from a clay piñata my blindfolded dad smacked.
Strange for a five-year-old far from her Indiana home — but what wasn’t to like about candy and presents?
Although, if we’d spent Christmas in Austria, the celebration might have seemed less merry. Masked ghouls, representing Krampus, St. Nicholas’s evil counterpart, stalk city streets, shaking sticks at bad children. Scary for a kid who, despite missionary roots, pushed her little sister around.
Nearly meatless in Mexico, my family and I would have embraced the Japanese tradition of eating Kentucky Fried Chicken on Christmas Day.
However, I wouldn’t have savored South Africans’ holiday delicacy: deep-fried Emperor Moth caterpillars.
Bereft of television in Mexico, I would’ve welcomed Sweden’s Christmas Eve tradition: watching vintage clips of Donald Duck. According to one American visiting future Swedish in-laws, nothing can disturb this sacred ritual.
We all have holiday expectations. My missionary family was no exception. We didn’t want a different Christmas!
I didn’t want a different Christmas during 2020, either. I wanted normal, when our children and grandchildren filled the house.
Yet that odd Mexican holiday’s sights and sounds linger, 65 years later.
My parents treasured them too, despite hard times. Mom delivered my 12-pound brother at home.
Dad, who broke the clay piñata with his forehead, suspected villagers controlling it had intentionally smacked the gringo. Despite major headaches and self-taught Spanish, Dad pioneered a church.
The beautiful, thorny Christmas tree embodied that beautiful, thorny year.
Appropriate for followers of a Savior who experienced thorny years.
In 2020, Christmas was different.
We Zoomed gatherings. Met family in a park for masked Christmas walks. Pantomimed hugs.
Different. Thorny.
But Christmas 2020 was good.
One I will never forget.
Your Extraordinary Ordinary: What unique Christmas sticks in your mind?
Recently, my pastor, instead of dismissing the congregation after the benediction, seated us.
How could he? Everyone had closed their Bibles and grabbed their purses.
“We have a problem,” Pastor said.
A million-dollar error in our building project? Heresy in the articles of faith? The closing of Cracker Barrel?
He said, “We don’t know when summer’s over.”
For weeks, the church staff has trumpeted program changes in bulletin, website and email. Though Pastor performed the parental equivalent of holding our faces in his hands and articulating new schedules s-l-o-w-l-y, we’ve asked spouses. “Um, what time does church start?
Past decades, summer exited after Labor Day. As for equinoxes — spring never arrived in March, so why bow to September’s equinox for summer’s departure?
Opening school early has shaken our culture. Back-to-school sales start before the previous school year ends. Indiana’s General Assembly passed school-excuse legislation so county fair winners could participate in the state fair.
Once upon a time, children sent to bed during broad daylight assumed they’d committed major sin, or their parents suffered from psychosis. Now, kids consider such craziness normal. Soon, they’ll consider cleaning their rooms as natural as microwaving pizza bites. No wonder everyone worries about this generation.
This summer’s weather has reinforced bewilderment. Droughts during June fried Midwestern fields and gardens. Unheard-of July rains rescued us and produced bizarre green August lawns.
Early last week, night temperatures fell into the 40s. Before Labor Day, they soared into the 90s.
Should we rev up the air conditioner or the furnace this morning? How about this afternoon? This minute?
Covering all seasonal bases, we snuggle under blankets every night. Turn on air conditioning, start ceiling fans and open windows. No wonder we’re befuddled. We alternate hot chocolate and snow cones.
Besides all this, baseball, basketball, tennis, golf and football blare from screens. Aaaaugh!
Let’s switch from Daylight Savings Time now, instead of November — absorb maximum confusion like a sucker punch and be done with it!
Or next year, we could once again mark Labor Day as summer’s end. But 100-degree heat waves might bake us for two more months.
We’d be more confused than ever.
Your Extraordinary Ordinary: How do you handle summer’s supposed end?
These small words elicit king-sized effects.
My first cranky thought, another songwriter has run out of originality, as in:
Being there (ooh, baby) Being there (ooh, baby) Being there is like … Being there (ooooh, BABY!)
Okay, I need a second cup of coffee today. With double cream.
Much better.
Now I recall that being there when airline personnel solicit volunteers to take a different flight, I might land a free future trip.
Being in the right checkout line can mean the difference between three Tylenol® and only one.
Being there at a library during a 1970 Christmas break placed me near the railing of a second-story atrium, eyeing my future husband below. Thus, I ensured he wasn’t with a girl and could “accidentally” run into him. (He still calls this stalking, but that’s because he hasn’t yet drunk his morning tea.)
Being there at a gas station when someone, perched on a ladder, is changing prices can mean a savings of 11 whole cents per gallon. Although, if the price is upped 11 whole cents, you’ve picked the perfect time and place to ruin your morning.
Though that timing isn’t as bad as certain shoplifters’ when, according to Reader’s Digest, they attempted major heists on Shop-with-a-Cop Day.
Being there can get complicated. Still, we want others to be there for us.
My mother refined this into an art form. One joyful day, when I learned I was ranked 10th in my high school class, I arrived home to the fragrance of muffins fresh from the oven. She’d baked them either to celebrate or console. Whatever happened, they were there for me.
So was Mom.
However, she also was there to enslave me with chores, require church attendance, and stare through my dates and me with righteous black eyes.
Years later, I appreciated her when I, too, baked after-school treats, mini-vanned my kids everywhere, and wandered into the den to “get stamps” from my desk while they were entertaining dates.
Being there can be threatening, wonderful, scary, tedious, triumphant, smelly, or comforting, but rarely boring. And lots better than not being there.
Sometimes, it’s just plain cuddly.
Tonight, Hubby and I are watching a Cubs game. We don’t make brilliant conversation. We don’t have to make conversation at all.
We simply savor being there.
Ooooh, baby.
Your Extraordinary Ordinary: Who’s been there for you?
“Happy Father’s Day, Dad. It’s Rachael.” Holding the phone, I’d picture his ornery grin.
“Rachael who?”
“Your daughter, Rachael. Your own flesh and blood,” I’d retort, and the fight was on.
If we’d been polite, each would have suspected the other was up to no good.
A pastor for nearly six decades, Dad radiated his own style. Even his conversion sprouted in atypical soil.
A Depression child, he scavenged Louisiana pinewoods to supplement his meager diet. Dad hid outside churches where African-American worshippers sang joyous music.
Their lives were even harder than his. How could they celebrate Jesus? Dad couldn’t stay away.
Eventually, he graduated from a Bible institute, where he’d met my mother. They married and worked at a Navajo mission in New Mexico. Throughout decades, they planted/pastored small, independent churches in Mexico, Indiana and Oregon. Sometimes they lived in for-real parsonages. Sometimes in churches’ back rooms, a grass hut, and a mountainside, snow-covered log shack.
Even if churches paid him — a rarity — Dad worked construction to support five children. We counted off in the station wagon to ensure nobody was left asleep on a pew. I was number two.
Ahead of trends, Dad shrugged off ties and other unnecessary protocol. Having taught himself to play guitar, he led singing with his three-blocks-away bass voice.
Dad ministered as much outside church walls as inside. He drank coffee with troubled diners at Denny’s and introduced them to Jesus. He made Cracker Barrel servers giggle and hugged lonely Hispanic and Chinese restaurant owners, far from home. When someone was in need, he opened his thin wallet.
Once, in Oregon, he picked up movie-mad English hitchhikers who asked if Indians were on the warpath. Dad promptly arranged with local ranchers to stage a cowboy-Indian fight, complete with flaming arrows.
Even more dangerous: Dad used a fishing pole to cast a jelly doughnut among his church members’ weight-loss group.
I said, “In Heaven, you’ll be perfect. What will you do then?”
He looked genuinely puzzled. “I don’t know.”
At 91, Dad did go to Heaven. His family — and his guardian angel — all stopped chewing our nails.
But we miss him. So much.
Someday, I’ll stand at Heaven’s entrance, too. Jesus will know my name and give me a huge hug.
Dad? He’ll wiggle his mustache and say, “Rachael who?”
Your Extraordinary Ordinary: How was your father unique?
Glumly, my spouse and I agree on a date-and-time powwow. We discuss emailed lists of seven grandchildren’s end-of-year activities. We summon our calendars, determined to organize our world and theirs.
Right.
How can we attend a middle school concert, high school track meet and a graduation the same day 250 miles apart?
If only science would concentrate less on the ice caps and focus on beaming us to Timmy’s T-ball game on time.
We also review dates for Hubby’s end-of-semester grading and my writing projects. Can we mow the grass monthly and plant our garden before September?
Gaaa!
Woody Allen, expanding on a Yiddish proverb, said, “If you want to make God laugh, tell Him about your plans.”
My parents, who were pastors, believed God’s plans rarely matched ours. Why bother with calendars? Even trips for groceries or car repair were interrupted by “divine appointments” with hurting — and annoying, I thought — people. Especially if I’d planned for us to go swimming.
My dad disliked calendars not only for spiritual reasons, but because he hated whatever cramped his style. My mother, like an unpaid air traffic controller, organized five children’s piano lessons, sports practices and work schedules in her head — along with all church events.
Until I met my future husband, I considered that normal. At his house, however, an unobtrusive calendar with notations of who, what, when and where possessed a Clark Kent superpower: it ran four lives.
Yet, my naïve love and I envisioned harmonious life together. We did show up the same day for our wedding. But how have Hubby and I met additional calendar challenges?
First, beneath Hubby’s conventional exterior dwelt an adventurous spirit. He married me, didn’t he? Second, his career as a country doctor trashed predictability. Babies held zero respect for plans to eat and sleep. People in pain rarely followed office schedules.
Serving on a church staff and running my own launch-’em-and-land-’em household, I began to appreciate calendars. Mom memorized hers, but to be there for the people I loved, I needed a for-real calendar.
Hubby and I still want to be there for family, church and community. What if our calendars — and our lives — showed nothing but white space? Blank evidence that we cared for no one, and no one cared for us?
We’d rather learn to laugh with God.
Your Extraordinary Ordinary: Are you a calendar fan?
Eternal Father, outside of time, You know how the invention of the clock complicated our world. Not content with that, we not only invented Daylight Saving Time, but “spring forward” in March, re-darkening hopeful Midwest mornings to December gloom. OMG, I agreed with babies brought to church yesterday. While some changes are necessary, this isn’t one of them.
Father, thank You for a church who can turn a business meeting into a warm, loving family affair. Though, OMG, two tables of desserts probably sweetened things.
