To know me is to...

It begins with one of my weaknesses-- I admit I am a sucker for anything free.  I love shopping Costco if only because their free samples are so…free.  Trader Joe’s has delicious and healthier tastes every day that are…free.   In the olden days when they passed out cigarettes on street corners I made sure to get some though I didn’t smoke.  I am a sucker for anything free.

So the invitation to join a kind of club at my grocery store (what you so cal natives call your "market") and get a dozen free eggs and some very impressive bargains was a no brainer.  All I had to do was go on line, set up a user name and password (which I wrote down somewhere but I don’t know where) and automatically be eligible for very special deals.  They would be listed every week.  I just needed to remember to check the list and make sure I shopped for what was on sale.  No coupon clipping.  Just enter my club number and everything would happen like, well magic.

I was surprised, then, to get a message from my club.  I hadn’t expected personal communication.  I opened it quickly hoping that I was eligible for something else…free.  Instead there was a notice that the canned food my poodles Rookie and Blue like best was on sale --10 22 oz. cans for a dollar.  Wow!  Amazing deal.  And my gala apples were on sale for .$99 a pound.  Whew!  Couldn’t beat those prices. 

Then I paused for a moment.  It felt just a little bit creepy that this machine knew so much about me.  That every time I buy something at the store, a little creature is writing it down and saving it up in a file that is all about me.  I blushed for a moment, hoping they weren’t too upset the other day when I bought three bags of chocolate chips, a bag of valentine jelly beans and a pint of Ben and Jerry’s  “Americone Dream” ice cream.  Or if they did notice, I trusted that they also noticed that my cart more often has lots of romaine lettuce and fresh fruit.

“They know all about me,” I fussed.  And then after another, somewhat longer pause, I relaxed.  I even smiled.

They know all about me, I thought, but they really don’t know me.   They don’t know that the canned dog food is what gets my furry friends to eat their dinner more quickly so that we can take a walk before it is time to make my dinner.  They don’t know how I laugh watching them steal each other’s food when they each have exactly the same thing.

And those apples?  Not just apples.  That’s what I eat every noon with my ¼ cup of dry roasted peanuts.  When I am home I sit on the patio loving the sun, reading a book and taking a few minutes away from everything else I should be doing or thinking or worrying.  Those apples are more than round red things in a bag.  They feed my body, and they feed my soul.

So even if someone were to find  out everything about me, and get my social security number and my bank account number and all my pin numbers, if someone were to sit down at my computer and figure out my password in a second, if they were to know all about me, they still wouldn’t know me.

There might be identity theft, but no one can steal my identity or your identity.  Nobody can take what makes us who we are, from our God given gifts, to our God forbid quirks, to the things that make us laugh and the things that make us cry.  Because the only One who matters knows us best of all, and loves us anyway. 

For God is good... all the time!

An Unexpected Valentine

So it is Valentine’s Day coming up and I have to say I have very mixed feelings.  It isn’t that I will be ignored---I already have a pink flowered plant in my window that my daughter in law brought by on Saturday.  And I am sure that Teddy will be as thoughtful on Tuesday as he was on our wedding anniversary when he took the day off and we went to Disneyland and then to dinner at the restaurant where Paul and I always celebrated. 

I will miss the fancy sentimental card I always got, the one I would have thought was corny if it hadn't been given to me by someone who loved me.  I will miss wondering if there will be flowers delivered to the office, or a box of dark chocolates at my place at dinner.  I will miss all of that, but I will smile knowing that our three boys will all remember the young women they love and they too will be showered with pink and red hearted love themselves.  I will hear Lynn Seibel singing the song from "The King and I" that he sang at Paul’s memorial service, and I will smile:  .

Don't cry young lovers, whatever you do,
Don't cry because I'm alone;
All of my memories are happy tonight,
I've had a love of my own.
I've had a love of my own, like yours-
I've had a love of my own.

But what startles me is the person, besides Paul,  who keeps joining me when I think about the holiday.  It isn’t Cupid.  It isn’t the boy named Doug in my fourth grade class who gave me a store bought card instead of a valentine out of a classroom box.  It isn’t Bob in 7^th grade.  It isn’t even all the boys who would never have dreamed of giving me a valentine though I dreamt of them all of the time.

One of my Valentines this year is going to be  Margaret Thatcher.  Really.  Margaret Thatcher, as least as she is portrayed by Meryl Streep in the movie “Iron Lady.”   Margaret in the movie is slightly befuddled and often confused.  She can’t always grasp that her husband is gone, having died some years before.  She sees him often and talks to him frequently and hasn’t been able to go through his things as much as her family wishes she would.   But the moment I share with Margaret is in a moment of sudden clarity.  She has gotten up in the middle of the night and she starts madly packing then stopping just a minute to rest.  Sitting in the middle of a pile of trash bags she wistfully asks Dennis’ memory…

“Were you happy?”  After all the years they shared, all they gotten through, all he had to tolerate because of her time as politician and prime minister, after all the years they had lived and loved… she wondered “were you happy?”  And as I see that scene my heart cringes and my eyes moisten because sometimes I ask the same thing…

We don’t know what Dennis would have said.  But I am confident that that if we were to look our Valentines straight in their eyes, our husbands and wives, sons and daughters, brothers and sisters and friends, if we were to look our Valentines straight in the eyes and simply say, “No matter what, from now to forever, I love you very much.,” their answer to Margaret’s question would be ‘Yes.”

For as the Bible says, “Love never ends….faith hope and love abide these three, but the greatest of these is love.”

Battling for second

The big news around here today is the scandal at Claremont McKenna College, where a “newly former” administrator inflated student SAT scores so that the school would be higher in the rankings in places like U.S. News and World Report.   By inflating each score by only 10 or 20 points the school managed to end up at number 9 in the nation. The outcry is great.  We know that cheating and lying are wrong, and many editors in many papers have commented on the tragic irony of schools which have codes of honor for their students violate the very ethics those codes demand.

But the problem goes beyond that campus, and beyond the 91711 zip code and even beyond academia in its broadest sense.  For the effort to get a higher ranking seems to be a symptom of a culture that just can’t get beyond needing to always be #1, or at least ahead of as many people as possible.

And I have to say I get it.  I get it really well because I am competitive to a fault, and sometimes a big fault.  I always wanted to be the best.  I didn’t cheat to get there, but I certainly didn’t behave myself when I didn’t.  I was furious, and red faced and pouty when Miss Summers said Susan had the best penmanship in our fourth grade class. (that’s when we actually learned how to write cursively).  Sixth grade may have been my greatest year:  just because I couldn’t stand the idea of those twins winning the 50 yard dash I ran faster than ever before or ever since to be the speediest girl runner in the grade, and was darn close to Gordon who won the boys’ race.  Our teacher gave out stars for everything and so I sat straighter (posture star), read more (book star), had a bigger vocabulary (word star) than anyone else and managed a certain (and I am sure annoying) smugness for most of that school year.

I get wanting to be number 1.  I also get what it feels like to be number 2, having lost more sermon competitions than probably any other minister in our National Association (I have since stopped entering).   And watching my son begin to get responses to his law school applications, and hearing him tell me exactly what the ranking of any school is and where he hopes to go, I  realize that he has inherited some of that competitiveness.  Not necessarily a good thing

Because truth to tell, in the end, and in the final analysis, it probably doesn’t matter whether you edge out number 10 to become number nine, or whether you have the second best penmanship or even the second worst penmanship.  The other side of the story is the side we often forget.  As often as not  the one who was first in his law school class at the number one school who entered the very best firm and now makes the most money of any new graduate, works 24/7, doesn’t have time to spend his money and hates his job.

Better to be like the rest of us, whether we are content or not:  pursuing something we are passionate about, or doing something that lets us pursue something we are passionate about.  Because for that “rest of us”, which is actually the most of us, what we do makes a difference. Nothing could matter more than  helping a 2^nd grader read a story,  sharing a sandwich with the homeless man who camps on the church steps, reading a poem that makes us weep, seeing a picture that makes us gasp, hearing a song that touches our soul or holding the hand of a friend whose heart is breaking.

For after all, some One we love, who loves us no matter what, has said  that the last shall be first, and the first shall be last.   And all God’s people said “Amen!”

Ignominy

There is only one word that keeps coming to my mind after the football game last Sunday, the one that really didn’t need to be played because it was, every one was sure, a “slam dunk,” (to borrow a metaphor from another winter sport).  And I had trouble finding the word because, it turns out I was spelling it wrong.  The word means (according to Random House Webster’s College Dictionary) “1.  Personal disgrace; dishonor. 2. Shameful or dishonorable quality or conduct.”  I was spelling the word igonominy.  The correct spelling is Packers.

I have made much too much about just how terrific Wisconsin sports are lately.  But the tides are turning.  The University of Wisconsin Badgers lost at the Rose Bowl, though they put up a good fight and were in the hunt until literally the last seconds.  The Packers, on the other hand, played as badly as they did decades ago when they were not so much a team as a joke.   It was painful to watch, and though there were plenty of reasons and lots of excuses the dropped passes, the fumbles, made us cringe for four quarters.  When it was all over I hid my Packer beads.  I took off my Packer sweatshirt, and sweater and teeshirt.  I quickly exchanged my Packer pajama pants for neutral gray sweats.  What else could a fan do?   The cheesehead went back up on the shelf.

But not, apparently, up high enough.  Always sensitive, always wanting to please, our just-over-one-year old Standard Poodle is now tall enough to reach that shelf.  While I was mourning the loss in my study, he was busy.  When I came out to the living room there were pieces of foam rubber cheese everywhere.  I mean everywhere.  And though it was a mess to clean up, I really couldn’t really blame him.  After all, the Packers stunk.

Then, after a while,  I decided it was time to be sensitive myself.  I imagined what it felt like to be in the locker room after the loss, how the Packers must have felt as they slumped through the town that defines itself by the team the people of Green Bay own.  And it wasn’t as if it was a quiet defeat.  Literally millions of people around the world watched their downfall.

How awful it would be if our own mistakes were that public, that visible.  How painful it would be if we walked down any street and everybody could see us as the losers we sometimes are.  How miserable it would be to have to see the lopsided score on the computer screen, in newspaper headlines, running over and over again on the ESPN bottom line.

And how much worse even for there to be no going back, no mulligans, no do overs, no redemption.  How hard it would be to make a mistake and know that not only are there consequences, but there is no way of evening the score, or finding reconciliation, or getting a second chance at being a success.

So I guess those of us who gather together on Sunday mornings in churches instead of in front of televisions, who hear comforting, forgiving, loving words instead of the thump of helmets or the sound of defeat are the lucky ones.  We are the ones who can never lose, because there is One who will always find us when we are lost, who will lift us up when we are feeling down, who will turn us from defeat, and  lead us on to victory. 

(And I am still, despite it all, a Cheesehead.  Next year…..there’s always next year.)

Two Kinds of People

We all know that in almost any situation there are “two kinds of people.”  There are, of course, good people and bad people.  There are cat people and dog people.  There are electric stove people and gas stove people (among the few who still find time to do their own cooking).  There are Pepsi People and there are Coke people, there are manual transmission and automatic transmission people, there are hotel vacation people and camping vacation people. And so forth.

Most often which kind of the two kinds you are is   simply a matter of taste, habit, preference, experience.  I grew up with dogs and only later had a cat so my line between them isn’t quite so clear.  I love driving a stick shift, but my car is automatic.  I love Pepsi but won’t complain if all there is is  Coke.  I prefer gas stoves, but mine is electric. I am not quite so flexible on the camping thing---I just happened to grow up in a family where my father’s favorite joke was that camping to him was staying in a hotel with the electric blanket set on low.

But sometimes what kind of the two kinds we are says a whole lot more about us than which kind of pet we’re going to have, or soda we’re going to drink or car we’re going to buy. It actually helps define our character.

There are two kinds of people.  In the theater, at stadiums there are two kinds of people.  There are middle of the long row people, and there are aisle people.  And I was reminded while sitting at the Rose Bowl just what might mean.

We were about 10 seats in from the end of the row, about 10 seats from the middle of the row.  Which meant that we only had a few people to trample over when we got up to get out to get something. It meant that there were only a few people trampling over us when they got up to get out to get something.   And as I was standing still, sucking my stomach in to let a larger fellow by, I remembered a conversation from my distant past about which seats to get for an Angels’ baseball game.

I am an aisle person.  As I said to our friend “I hate to have to disturb everyone every time I want to get something to eat or use the restroom.”  He confessed to being a middle of the row person.  “I don’t like sitting close to the aisle because then everybody always bothers me and I always miss a good play on the field when they’re standing in front of me.”

It is, at least a metaphor….

Which makes you who you are? Do you mind having to stand up and suck in to let someone get where they are going, or would you rather make someone else stand up and suck in to help you along the way? Do you worry more about how you might inconvenience others, or do you worry about how they inconvenience you?  Is it more important for you to get want you think you want, instead of helping someone else get what they need? 

So if you're looking for seats in the Kingdom, just where do you want them to be? 

(And BTW, I understand that in Europe when people move in and out of rows they face the seats instead of facing the front.  A much better view for everyone, I would think.)