Premeditated Prayer

I have the privilege of leading prayer in our little church one Sunday a month.  My evangelical church heritage is one that emphasizes spontaneity over preparation when it comes to congregational prayer.  But I am not wired that way.  I prefer to contemplate long and hard before speaking in public.  Scripture and church tradition are laden with written prayers.  So, in a break with a new tradition and in keeping with an old one, the following prayer was composed in hopes that it would express the heart of a congregation in public prayer without my hearing the prayer requests that would be vocalized on that Sunday; a prayer that would have to rely on the foreknowledge of God.

Congregational prayer - January 20, 2013

Our Father in heaven,

what a gift it is to call you father.

We come, not as subjects or slaves,

but as sons and daughters.

We are not many wise according to the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble;

but you have chosen the foolish things of the world to shame the wise,

and chosen the weak things of the world to shame the strong.

We thank you for our weakness, so we can experience your strength.

Keep us from trusting in the prosperity of our nation, or the skill of our hands,

but teach us instead to trust in your spirit.

Help us to bless our enemies,

for they drive us closer to you.

Be near to the broken-hearted and lonely.

Give them the oil of gladness instead of mourning,

The mantle of praise instead of a spirit of fainting.

Make our marriages a reflection of Christ's love for the church.

Give us grace to forgive and grace to receive forgiveness.

Bring the healing for which you suffered

to those who are sick in body.

For the one who is resisting you,

we pray that pride would give way to penitence.

Open our eyes to see the works you have created for each of us to do,

and not to be dismayed at the challenge

or envious of others whose work seems more important.

For we are all part of your body.

As your body, we pray that you would unite us in charity.

May your word go forth and bear fruit in our lives today.

Amen.

Doubling Down On UNO

Piled high on the shelf of our hall coat closet are a number of board games: Monopoly, Sorry, Yahtzee, Clue and more.  These are games of chance, each with an element of 'the roll of the dice' or 'the luck of the draw'.  In spite of this component, even the most random game of chance can be affected by the choices each player makes.  In other words, the skill of the player does matter.  This is why people gamble.  They think they are smarter than chance.

Our youngest daughter Mercy is, at seven, not quite up to the complexities of many of our board games, but she adores UNO.  UNO, for the uninitiated, is a classic card game.  One evening this week, her other sisters were occupied with other things, so Mercy asked if I would play a game of UNO.  I had a few minutes to spare and said "O.K., one game".  A single hand of UNO can go on for quite a long time before someone goes out, which is why I agreed to play ONE game.

I Can't Win. 

Part of the reason Mercy likes UNO so much is that she has developed a reputation for winning.  I am sure she is not gifted enough to be consciously calculating the odds of which order of card play offers the highest likelihood of achieving victory.  However, she does have a knack.  She wins far more often than she loses.

I knew this going in.  So, it was not unexpected that I would lose.  And I did.  In very short order.  We didn't even make it through the 'draw' deck once, leaving us with time to play more.  As any self-respecting man who has been so soundly thrashed would do, I challenged her to 'the best two out of three', meaning that one of us had to win two and I hoped it would be me.  Please reference my opening remarks about skill.  Surely I had more skill than a seven-year-old.

Game Two was a repeat of Game One.  I came close to going out once or twice, but again Mercy won.  I was beginning to feel like Megamind in his contests with Metroman: She would win some, I would almost win others.  In desperation, I cried out, "Best three out of five!"  This, of course, meant that I would have to win three in a row, a highly unlikely scenario.  In Game Three, I had a decent hand, played carefully, and lost even more quickly than I had the first two games.   In suspicion I looked at the discard pile.  Then I counted it to confirm.  There had been 14 cards discarded, which meant that as 7 cards are dealt to start the game, my brilliant opponent had never had to draw even one!  All along, Mercy played calmly, with a sweet smile on her face.  She would even apologize when she had to foist a 'draw 4' card on me (see "I Can't Win" above). 

Rather than gracefully accept my defeat, I made a classic mistake.  I doubled down on a  bad investment.  I had already played longer than I should have.  But, in a rather graceless attempt to salvage the remnants of my pride, I stated boldly that there was 'no way' Mercy could win four in a row and I would pay her a dollar if she did.  So, now I was into my UNO investment with both time and money.

You can guess the outcome.  After a slightly longer hand than humiliating Game Three, I was on the brink of winning.  I had one card left and called 'Uno'.  But, my discard, while not the color of Mercy's remaining card, was the same number, and she went out.  My other daughters swear I was rolling around on the floor howling in agony for several minutes afterwards.  I can assure you I was not that undignified.  Finally, I trudged back to my bedroom and returned to pay one quarter for each game Mercy had won.  And she accepted each quarter with the same cheerfulness as she had each victory.

I did learn from this experience.  A couple of nights later, when we played another game of UNO, I stopped after losing the first game.

Drinking Buddies

Perhaps my experience is unusual, but I detest the occasional after hours social function.  Leaving aside the fact that my best waking hours during the week are already spent at work, the fact remains that the events themselves leave me uninspired.

Here's why.  Work socials throw people together who may have years of history together or only a few days, which creates natural barriers to interpersonal engagement.  I would be delighted to discuss religion and politics.  Those topics are definitely taboo.  Everyone has a family of origin or their own progeny or both, yet discussion of those vital relationships is usually limited to brief introductions.

So, what do people talk about?  Conversation revolves around boasting, gossip, and drink.  As the evening progresses, the more bold the boasting, the nastier the gossip, the more elaborate the details of alcoholic beverages consumed and consequent outlandish actions.  Either people fake their pleasure extremely well, or they truly enjoy these times much more than I.

While absorbed in one such event recently, I was reminded of nothing so much as these verses in Isaiah 5:

Woe to those who are wise in their own eyes
And clever in their own sight!

Woe to those who are heroes in drinking wine
And valiant men in mixing strong drink.

Yet, in the swamp of trivial conversation, I always sense a need for simple affirmation.  People want to feel that their lives matter, are interesting and fun.  When family or children do come up, I can interject something to convey the joy I find in mine.  This is so seemingly unusual that it often brings to light the desire someone else has for similar closeness or regrets for missed opportunities.  An unplanned moment of reality and truth breaks into the dark.  Then, I understand again why I need to overcome my natural reluctance.  Simply being available.  It matters.  

California Dreamin'

Do dreams matter?  I wonder.  Not aspirations or goals as in 'I've Got A Dream'.  I am speaking of the dreams that Scrooge refers to when trying to explain the vision of the Spirit of Christmas Past as 'a crumb of potato or a bit of undigested beef'.  In my case, too much popcorn with loads of salt almost always predicates odd nocturnal visions.  

At my age, I could qualify for the Biblical reference to 'old men dreaming dreams'.  What of the reliance on dreams in Scripture?  My theology allows for the possibility of communication through that other dimension, but I haven't experienced it.  I am dubious when others claim to have dreams with meanings, in no small part because I have seen people making decisions based on 'dreams' or 'impressions' with catastrophic results.

But, recently, I started journaling my dreams to see if there is some detectable pattern.  I am listening with genuine curiosity to conversations about dreams.  Whether I discover anything more than Scrooge did, at least I will have explored the wonder.

Robbie - R.I.P.

For the second time in a decade or so, we buried a cat on the hill on the back side of our house.  Robert Malcolm was unique.  He drank by dipping his paw into water and licking it off, ate by scooping his food out of the dish and nibbling it off the garage floor.  He would go down the slide of the play-set in the back yard.  He endured patiently my grand-daughter's petting, pulling, and poking.  He assumed if you sat on the patio that was an invitation for him to climb on your lap.

Of course, he had bladder issues for his first year, turned the play-set area into his own gigantic cat box as an adult, and left any number of bloody carcasses in the garage.  Still, of our three cats, he was the only friendly one.  Jane, the female, prefers solitude.  Baron, the other male, moves for food and not much else.  Robbie liked people.

It started one morning last November, when I tried to go out the door from our kitchen to the garage and something was in the way.  It was Robbie, lying on the doormat, obviously in pain.  A trip to the vet and he was diagnosed with a blocked urinary tract, apparently a common ailment for cats.  Immediately, we were confronted with life-and-death decisions that involve cost of care.  The vet's office is not a good place to be making those decisions for a cat.  I cannot imagine how it would be at a hospital with a parent or child or spouse.  In any case, Robbie had surgery and spent a couple of nights with the vet.  I suspect the final tally was close to the combined total for everything we had spent on cats over the years up to that point.  Robbie came home with mild bladder control issues, but after a couple of weeks appeared to be better.  He would not eat the special food proscribed, but did take all the antibiotics.  So, we hoped for the best.  

But the first of January, symptoms returned.  Almost exactly a year after a sinus infection kept me home from work, I had another one.  As I reclined in the sun looking out my bedroom window, I saw Robbie huddled on the lawn, still wet with dew.  He was too miserable to move.  As the sun warmed the lawn, he stretched out and spent most of the day there, motionless.  Our options were to let him go or make another costly trip to the vet with no real hope of long-term recovery.  So, we decided to let him go.  He spent the next day laying on a doormat in the garage.  My wife said he moaned occasionally through the day and once looked at her piteously.  At that, she said a simple prayer asking his Maker to shorten Robbie's suffering.  When I came home from work not long after, his breathing was slow and shallow.  It was almost over.  We had an evening engagement that we had to attend, so we took our youngest girls and left our two older daughters at home to keep an eye on Robbie.  Less than an hour after we left, a short text message told us Robbie was gone.

It was a sad drive home and a sadder home-coming.  There were tears and tissues, hugs and an uncharacteristically quiet bed time.  Children have not yet learned to restrain their affections, to guard their hearts against loss, so the death of a 'simple animal' pained our girls more keenly than it did me.  Later, as I dug Robbie's final resting place in the clay on our hill, I wondered whether my reserve had caused me to miss something important.  I will miss that pesky cat.

Skirts

After long hesitation, I have a confession to make: I like skirts. That is, I like my wife to wear them and I like my daughters to wear them.  Frankly, I prefer that all women wear skirts or dresses rather than pants.  Not because I have an overt desire to see more female legs, though as a man I cannot deny that an ankle or calf (not the bovine type) is a very interesting piece of anatomy.  Rather, I appreciate the differences between male and female.  I want daughters who value those differences enough to resist trends that trivialize distinctions God created.  It may seem silly, but I don't want my wife or daughters to have a wardrobe that is essentially interchangeable with mine.

One only has to observe a few youthful androgynous couples wearing their matching skinny jeans, t-shirts, and knit caps to realize that the eradication of differences between male and female fashion is nearly complete in some circles.  My girls live in jeans most of the week, a habit that is hard to overcome.  Jeans are becoming regular attire for women in the corporate world I work in.  But on Sunday, my wife and I expect our daughters to look, as we so quaintly put it, like young ladies.  

Call me chauvinistic or old-fashioned, but instead of dismally unflattering mannish garments or overtly provocative attire, there is a form of feminine dress where the mysterious female otherness is apparent, yet modest.  I have no formula, no dress code.  But, I know it when I see it.  Somehow, I want to help my daughters see it, too.