Consolation on the loss of a balloon

Have you ever had one of those moments when the full surreality of your actions comes home to you?  Not in a bad way.  There's just something in the moment that says, "This is really ridiculous, even if it is absolutely necessary at this moment." 

For example, today, my daughter's balloon died.  It was one of those balloons made from a blown up rubber surgical glove.  Her grandpa made it for her.  When I was little, we made them into turkeys, but Boogaloo is fascinated by sea creatures, so hers was an octopus.  She kept this thing alive for a month and a half.  She tied yarn on it and led it around the house.  She accidentally cut the knot off the top, and we had to tie another one because the balloon could not be allowed to die. 

Well, today, it died.  Popped.  Burst in two.  There was no saving this balloon. 

She came into my room.  "Mommy, go to Grandpa and Grandma's house." 

I looked at her in confusion.  "Why?"  We weren't planning a trip any time soon.

She held up the pieces of her broken balloon. 

I understood.  "Oh, sweetheart.  I'm sorry your balloon broke, but we're going to have to wait awhile before we get a new one." 

Consequently tears.  She fled back to her room, and I followed.  We sat down on the bed and looked at the misshapen pieces of blue latex.

"It was a good balloon, wasn't it?" I asked.  "You had fun with it.  You tied it to strings and led it around the house."  Immediately, I felt a little silly, eulogizing a balloon. I mean, it's a balloon.  But my daughter's grief was real.  That balloon had comforted her through getting stitches.  It had entertained her.  I won't say it loved her because that's just silly, but in her mind, who knows?   Here was a part of her world that wasn't going to come back. 

In a few years, we might be doing this for the dog, or, God in his mercy forbid, another relative or a friend.  Isn't it good that she gets used to the notion of passing with the tiny things first, so she'll have a concept to build on when the big griefs come? 

She got off the bed and went downstairs.  I think she's consoling herself with some Calvin and Hobbes.   The occasion might even warrant some ice cream, but I don't think I'll carry it that far.  There's a fine line between recognizing grief and perpetuating an overimportance in these little things.  In moments like these, we have to teach each other perspective. 

Delayed Reflections on our State as a Nation

I found this in my blog file and thought it was time it saw the light of day.  It's only a few months old. 

Two thoughts occurred to me while I was reading my devotions this morning.  The first was upon reading Psalm 144, which decries the invasion of foreigners "whose right hands are deceitful."  If God defends us against such people, the psalmist says, then the nation will prosper.  "Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord," he finishes. 

I sat in bed thinking about that, and I thought, "How true.  If we could keep out the claims of foreign ideas, not physical foreigners but foreign faiths and unfaiths, then how much stronger would we be.  How much healthier would we be if we exercised Biblical living, and if we weren't plagued by the dogmatization of the sinful nature."   Once we were a Christian nation, I thought.  But then I thought about a blog I had just read (Faith and History) which said that actually, the rights that Jefferson cited came not from Christian theology, but from John Locke, whose religious beliefs were unstated and whose political philosophy often flew in the face of orthodoxy and orthopraxy.  He believed that government was best based on the notion of self-interest, not righteousness.  If that is the root of our political practice (not that it hasn't governed us all along), then we've never really been a Christian nation.  We have been a great nation, a nation with a strong Christian presence and a Christian foundation, but the principles on which our government is based have been humanist from the beginning.  We are another Rome. 

Rome, if you believe the Aeneid, was a nation of immigrants that made itself great.  It rose up at such a time as was proper.  It defeated another empire, one, if you believe Chesterton, with beliefs that could have destroyed all the good in the world.  It was the gateway for the gospel into Asia, Africa, and Europe.  It was a center of learning, and at some points in its history, a representation of what good government should be.  At other points in its history, we see nasty, glaring injustices like the arenas and massacres of whole peoples.  We see that in our own history as well.  They as a nation were not Christian.  They were not founded on Christian principles;  they did not behave in Christian manners, even when Christianity was the official religion of the state.  Rome was a humanistic state.  God raised it up to accomplish his purposes, and when those purposes were accomplished, he let it fall.  I'm still in the middle of "City of God," but that's what Augustine reportedly said the Romans of his day who were watching Rome fall around them, and I imagine it's what he would say to us today.

So have we ever been a nation whose God is the Lord?  Has anyone?  We have had our moments.  Emancipation comes to mind, but even that came at the expense of how much blood and as a result of how much sin and with how much political motivation?  The history of any nation is proof of total depravity, really.  Even the good things that we do are not perfect things;  they are tainted by everything that preys on humanity's soul.   

I think it's time, and I know I'm not alone in this, for American Christians to realize that we are no longer the majority, and we can no longer act like the majority.   There has been an "How dare they?" element in our rhetoric that needs to go away.  We need to speak the truth and defend it as if it weren't common sense, because it isn't.  We need to have reasons, but we also can't be ashamed to say "Because God says so, and I trust Him to make it work."  Paul tells us pretty plainly that the wisdom of God seems like foolishness to the world, even if  the power to recognize it is wired into  our souls.  If godly thought and behavior came naturally to sinful humanity, God wouldn't have had to issue the Law of Moses, let alone take on human flesh and suffer and overcome death. 

Easter meditation.

On driving to church Easter morning, I was meditating on what Christ has done for us on the cross.  I thought through the crucifixion, saw him hanging on the tree, adjusted his appearance so he looked more Mediterranean and less northern European, watched him lay in the tomb, and then got ready to watch him rise. 

And the thought came to me that nowhere in my meditation was Christ dead.  He was in the tomb, but I just couldn't process the reality of death.   It was more like he went into some sort of stasis, or maybe he was just holding his breath.  That's a dreadfully unorthodox way to look at Easter.  The committing of his spirit, the breathing his last, the blood and the water -- the Bible goes out of its way to make plain that Christ was dead.  Dead as a doornail.  Dead as anyone else in history.  Empty body.  The spirit flown.  Dead. 

His disciples certainly knew he was dead.  They were shaken to the core.  Joseph of Arimathea took down his limp, cold frame and put it in a tomb.  If he had had the least hope, wouldn't he have gone to a physician?  No, he was dead.

The reason I couldn't picture him dead was because I knew that he would get up again.  That seemed to make it all go away.  It made the period of death impossible.  I knew all along that he was going to get up and come out.  And as I thought about that, I said to God, "You knew all along too, didn't you?" 

Well, yes, thank you, Captain Obvious.  But it was comforting and awe-inspiring to think that God was always prepared to bring the obedient Jesus back from the dead.  Just biding his time, so to speak.  We hear so much about how God turned his face away that Friday night that it's easy to forget that this was all part of his plan from the moment sin birthed its ugly face into the world. 

At that point in the morning, I was content to just rest in the awesomeness of God's knowing, but this afternoon, as I ponder some more, I'm hit with the reflection that God's knowing didn't make the evil or the pain go away.  Jesus was still dead for those three days.   The disciples were still in danger.  Was God going to let the plan derail?  No.  But it still hurt. 

The same is true for us.  A lot of us are feeling uncertain about where our country is headed.  Christians in other parts of the world expect to die at any minute.  We may have personal griefs and uncertainties that feel like an infinite day of mourning.  We don't know how or when it all will end.  But God knows, and he has known all along.  This has been part of his plan from the beginning for our refinement, for our glorification as his sons.  And someday, we'll look at him and say, "You really had it in your hands all along, didn't you." 

Those post Lenten considerations

It's springtime.  Here in Oregon, we have blooming trees, daffodils coming up in the strangest places, and two straight sunny days with temperatures over 50 degrees.  But spring also hails the end of Lent and the beginning of new life spiritually (in a symbolic sort of way).  We have prayed.  We have abstained (not to be confused with fasting).  Some of us have actually fasted.  And we have all taken a moment to reflect on the magnitude of what the Lord Jesus did for us. 

I had one such moment at the grocery store.  It involved chocolate.

Before you say it, it's not what you think.  I did not give up chocolate for Lent.  My lenten goal was to improve my powers of concentration and meditation.  Ergo, I gave up television and movies in the evening (and the rest of the day too).  Seth is trying to learn physical discipline.  He officially gave up chocolate.  But I unofficially gave up chocolate because keeping chocolate in the house while someone is abstaining from it is like eating chocolate in front of someone who's abstaining from it (or allergic).  It's just mean.

As a reward for completing his goal, I offered to bake Seth a chocolate cake.  I was at the store buying ingredients, and I realized that I could buy chocolate again.  And chocolate was everywhere:  chocolate rabbits, chocolate cookie "bunny houses,"  chocolate in pastel wrappers, chocolate in bulk bins.  It seemed like every aisle  I turned into had something chocolate at the end of it.  And it was all available!  The tempation to run down the aisles like a maniac, grabbing chocolate and throwing it into my cart seized me briefly. 

I resisted it. 

However, this thought seized me as I steered sedately toward the healthy, daily necessity dairy section.  We give up things in Lent to remind us that we can give up things in this life to see rewards in the life to come.  We also do it to remind ourselves that our inner appetites are stronger than we think they are, and we are not as strong as we like to imagine ourselves.  But we also learn that we can master small urges and temptations with diligent application.  The pursuit of righteousness under the administration of God's grace does yield results, and if you resist the devil, he does flee from you.  And someday, thanks to the infusion of Christ's life into us, all of our innocent desires will no longer be tangled up with dangerous conclusions, and everything will occupy it's proper place as we stand and praise our Lord for all the many things He has done for us.

Including making chocolate.

A housework reflection

We all have a chore that we abominate above all things.  My mother-in-law loved the kitchen but hated the laundry.  I hate cleaning bathrooms.  I'm not sure why.  It's not time consuming.  I can knock out a good bathroom in 30 minutes flat.  Maybe it's because cleaning bathrooms was my chore when I was little.  Maybe it's because we have two of them now.  My working theory is that there are so many tiny things that need to be moved before I can get down to the real cleaning. 

So today being Thursday, it's my housework day.  Somehow my weekly schedule unites against spreading the housework out to the days when Seth is home or the days when we have preschool and errands to run, so that means that it all piles up on Thursday (with a fair helping for Saturday morning.  I miss my little house.  I could clean that thing in a afternoon.) .  I had a substantial list accumulated.  On top of the second batch of laundry and a batch of cookies, I had the bathrooms to clean, the carpets on three levels to vacuum,  and two nasty smells to track down.  It was going to be a full day. 

The day was also shaping up to be one of those days when nothing got done smoothly.  We found and dealt with one of the smells in Boogaloo's room.  (It was in the carpet.  So we worked carpet cleaner into the carpet with dust mops.  To quote the Boogaloo, "We're having fun.  This is awesome." I want to adopt her attitude. )  I wanted to cross Boo's room off the list, but she had an accident last night, and her sheets weren't dry, so we couldn't make the bed or vacuum the floor.  Okay, so we put that room on hold. I hunted down the other smell in the crisper drawer (because ginger root goes bad if you don't use it).   The fridge got a total cleaning, but the bedroom still wasn't dry.  Dagnabbit. 

Now, this would be the perfect time to start cleaning one of the bathrooms, right?  30 minutes.  Done. 

No, I came downstairs and debated whether it was time to make cookies or not.  The butter wasn't thawed, so I emptied the dishwasher.  Then Boo and I looked at baby sea turtles online.  Part of me said, "Head upstairs.  Clean a bathroom."  My conscious mind replied, "Maybe I'll vacuum now."  So I vacuumed Boogaloo's room before it was dry, got the hallway and the two staircases, and started on the main level.  Then it hit me.  I didn't want to vacuum either.  The dog wanted a walk.  The Boo wanted lunch an hour early (She must be growing again.).  The dining room was still dirty. 

I sat down at my computer and typed out a little rant about housework.  A little of the steam whistled out of my brain.  I feel better now.  I'll get up and take the dog for a walk.  Then I'll feed the Boo and take out the trash.  And then maybe, just maybe, I'll talk myself into cleaning the bathrooms.