Einstein's Youngest Student
Stories
Object:
Contents
A Story to Live By: "Einstein's Youngest Student"
Sharing Visions: "The Other End of the Barrel" by Shirley Lochowitz
Good Stories: "One of These Little Ones" by John Sumwalt
Scrap Pile: "If Your Soccer Ball Causes You to Stumble, Shoot It!" by John Sumwalt
An Invitation to Send Stories
A Story to Live By
Einstein's Youngest Student
"... no one who does a deed of power in my name will be able soon afterward to speak evil of me."
Mark 9:39b
Albert Einstein was one of the most brilliant physicists and mathematicians who ever lived. He was also one of the most humble men who ever lived. One story about Einstein centers around a little girl who lived near Princeton University. She was having trouble with arithmetic, but suddenly began improving in the subject. Her mother inquired why. The girl said that she heard about a professor in town who was good at numbers, so she rang his doorbell one day to ask for help, and he'd been teaching her every day since. When the mother asked whether she knew his name, the little girl replied: "Not exactly; it's something like Einstein."
Editor's Note: One summer while Jo and I were attending a Summer Institute at Princeton Theological Seminary in Princeton, New Jersey, I sat next to a native who was auditing the class. She was a woman in her middle seventies who, like many Princetonians of her era, knew and loved Albert Einstein. She regaled me with several stories of the great man, including a personal tale of the day at the golf course when she almost beaned him with a golf ball.
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Sharing Visions
The Other End of the Barrel
by Shirley Lochowitz
"For everyone will be salted with fire. Salt is good; but if salt has lost its saltiness, how can you season it? Have salt in yourselves, and be at peace with one another."
Mark 9:49-50
Eight years ago, I was working as a police officer for the Caledonia, Wisconsin Police Department. On August 10, 1995, I was dispatched to a shooting call, only to learn on the way that the 12-year-old boy who had been shot was my son. He had been shot by his 14-year-old friend, who had been playing with a .22 rifle that his father had allowed him to keep loaded under his bed.
I was the first one on the scene. As I walked into the back of the house, I saw my son, Nick, sitting against the frame of the basement doorway. He had been shot in the stomach. I thought my son was going to die in front of me, that's how bad he looked.
After almost five hours of emergency surgery, my son was given only a 50% chance of living, because he had lost so much blood. Although I didn't know it at the time, this was a moment in which my whole life would be changed forever.
My son was in the hospital for a full week. He was very weak and he had lost a lot of weight. Things went smoothly for a while. Nick tried to get right back to normal, but I was so afraid for him that I remember just staring at him when he would fall asleep on the couch,. I could only be reassured that he was OK by seeing his chest rise and fall. I was so grateful to see that he was still breathing!
As time went on, my fears grew and grew. I decided that there was no way I could go back to police work, although after almost 14 years, my love for it was deep. But my fears were turning into panic attacks as my world grew smaller and smaller. I started having terrible nightmares about the shooting. I could not sleep or eat and I withdrew more and more. I could not face the people I worked with for fear that they would find me weak for not being able to return to police work. I found that alcohol took away the fear, helped me to sleep, and made me better able to cope. But soon even that didn't work. I was constantly overcome with fear -- dread -- of something terrible happening.
I now know, looking back, that I was extremely depressed. My whole world that I had known before the shooting was gone. It was not a safe place, and I was not in control, as I had thought so many times. Then, instead of taking the fear away, the alcohol made it worse. I needed help. It wasn't until I found a wonderful doctor that I was able to understand that these were truly symptoms of post-traumatic stress. What I saw when I walked into that home on that day jolted my soul onto a path where I never thought I would go.
I had been raised Catholic, but for many years I had questioned my faith. Where was God? How could I get to know him? Well, that has been the blessing of this shooting. It is how I truly came to know that God is always with me, sending me his love as I send it back to him.
You see, a short time after the shooting I started speaking out on the issue of safe gun storage. I have dedicated myself to educating others about how important it is, if you have a gun in your home, to keep it secured so that these types of shootings don't keep happening. Needless to say, it was not a very popular subject eight years ago. No one wanted to listen. But I have seen dramatic changes over the last few years. There have been many times when I have just wanted to quit, believing no one wanted to hear what I had to say. But then, one night I had a vision that changed my life.
I had gone to sleep and I found myself in a very dark spot, standing on the blacktop of my grade school parking lot, which is also the parking lot of the church. It was a sunny day, but suddenly it grew very, very dark with what looked like storm clouds, until it was pitch black. I was standing in complete darkness feeling full of fear. Then there was a small break in the clouds. As they began to part, a bright, rainbow-filled, glorious light came down and shone directly on me. Then a large, strong voice said, "Our Father is very proud of you." I am not sure whose voice it was ... maybe Jesus or an angel ... but at that moment I was enveloped in love, calmness, peace. If I close my eyes I can still feel it today. I woke up with a sense of knowing that God is with me and that this was the work I was to continue.
This happened a few years ago, but I have no doubt that I was spoken to, and I am convinced that this shooting happened for a reason. I am living out that reason by sharing our story and the message of safe gun storage. There have still been times when I have doubted and have asked God for a sign, and he has always, always come through. When I think of giving up I say to God, "Please, if you want me to continue, send me something," and the phone will ring that day or the next with someone looking for me to speak on safe gun storage. Even my husband said to me, "Geeze, how many times do you need to be shown?"
My experience truly makes my belief stronger that all things happen in Divine Order, and in their own time.
Shirley Lochowitz is the founder of The Other End of the Barrel, an organization that addresses the issue of safe gun storage. She and her son continue to share their story in the hopes that these types of shootings will cease to happen. They recently completed a The Other End of the Barrel video. Shirley is available for speaking engagements. Contact her by phone at 262-989-4288, or write to P.O. Box 98, Franksville, WI 53126. Her website is http://www.otherendofthebarrel.org/
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Good Stories
One of These Little Ones
by John Sumwalt
"If any of you put a stumbling block before one of these little ones who believe in me, it would be better for you if a great millstone were hung around your neck and you were thrown into the sea."
Mark 9:42
The patrolman heard three shots fired in rapid succession and started running toward the sound as fast as his middle-aged legs would carry him. He saw the gun first, lying on the ground next to a chain link fence, and then he saw the child lying in a pool of blood, face down on the sidewalk. He couldn't have been more than ten years old. The child had a faint pulse when the patrolman made the radio call for the ambulance, but he was dead within a few minutes.
The patrolman listened to the siren wail above the din of the traffic as he cradled the dead child's head in his lap. It was always the same. The investigation would reveal that the child got the gun from an older brother or a cousin who was a member of one of the neighborhood gangs. His parents would be shocked to hear that their baby had a gun, would deny that their good Christian son, who went to the corner church every Sunday and sang in the children's choir, could have pointed a loaded gun in anger at another boy. The patrolman had heard it all before. And that was why he would come back tonight -- after he had weeded the flower garden in his backyard and wept for this child, and after he had tucked his own little children into their beds -- to the basement of the church on the corner where community leaders met two nights a week, seeking ways to make the neighborhood safe for their children. Someday it would be different. Someday ...
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Scrap Pile
If Your Soccer Ball Causes You to Stumble, Shoot It!
by John Sumwalt
"If any of you put a stumbling block before one of these little ones who believe in me, it would be better for you if a great millstone were hung around your neck and you were thrown into the sea. If your hand causes you to stumble, cut it off; it is better for you to enter life maimed than to have two hands and go to hell, to the unquenchable fire."
Mark 9:42-43
I have been talking to members of the press all week about soccer on Sundays, this nice, safe, upper middle-class problem we have in the suburbs of Milwaukee. You wouldn't believe all of the attention we received "right here" in Wauwatosa after that polite, carefully-worded-so-as-not-to-be-too-controversial letter from our clergy association hit the media fan. There was a front-page article in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel with a couple of comments from yours truly, and as a result I was interviewed by two television stations for the evening news. The next morning, I was on Wisconsin Public Radio with Tom Clark from 6:00-7:00 a.m., talking about why I believe families shouldn't have to choose between soccer and worship on Sunday mornings, and responding to callers from all over the state. After breakfast, just as I was about to step into the shower, someone from the ABC radio network in New York called for a sound bite. He told me he agreed with our clergy association. He said he has been trying to get his boss to let him off on Sunday mornings so he can sing in his church choir. When I arrived at the church, the receptionist buzzed me and said someone from NBC News was on the phone. Then it was CBS, then a reporter from a London newspaper (not one of the sleazy tabloids that went after Princess Diana, he was quick to say), then it was CNN, then National Public Radio, then the reporter from the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel called back for a follow-up story which was to appear on the front page the next morning.
This is not a common occurrence in our little church office. Sometimes we go months, even decades, without a single call from anyone in the national media. And all the while I was thinking that this is important, but it pales in comparison to the anguish we all suffer in this city every time another child is gunned down in the street.
Someone said that the novelist William Faulkner was a "mythmaker who could differentiate between facts and truth." "Facts," he said, "can be looked at from different angles, but the truth is unassailable." One of the unassailable truths of this wonderful metropolitan area where we live, this beautiful city by the lake with all of its many cultural and economic opportunities, is that children, youth, and adults die here almost every week because guns of all kinds are available to everyone, including children.
A few weeks ago in one of the suburbs, two young boys, both less than 13 years old, were discovered playing cops and robbers with real loaded guns, one a .38 caliber handgun. Last week a 14-year-old boy was held up at gunpoint as he was riding his bike home from school. It happened at 64th and North, only a few blocks from the church where I serve as pastor and in front of the home of one of my parishioners. The Wauwatosa police arrested two teenaged youth and confiscated a loaded .45 caliber pistol.
Where do they get the guns? And where do they get the attitude, the values (or lack of values), that allows them to pull the trigger of a gun pointed in the direction of another human being? I used to love to play good guys and bad guys when I was a kid.
"I get to be Roy Rogers!"
"No, I want to be Roy Rogers, you were Roy Rogers last time. It's your turn to be a robber."
"Bang, you're dead."
It was great fun with our stick guns and cap guns and our imaginations because nobody was ever really dead.
Seventeen-year-old Shayla Johnson was shot dead last month as she drove through the Burger King parking lot on North 35th Street. Shayla's mother said she couldn't believe it when a guy at the scene called and said her daughter had just been shot in the head. She said, "I thought he was playing, because sometimes people play on the phone." So she told him she didn't believe him. Then he put Shayla's friend on the phone and she started screaming and crying. (Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, September 14, 1997)
It breaks my heart to tell that story. I can hardly bring myself to think about it, much less say it aloud.
Where do they get the guns?
The National Rifle Association has a slogan that "guns don't kill people, people kill people." That is a fact, an indisputable fact. It is an act of free will when a human finger pulls the trigger of a gun. But it is also an unassailable truth that having a gun makes it easy to kill. Too easy. When was the last time you heard about a drive-by knifing?
Jesus said, "If any of you put a stumbling block before one of these little ones ... it would be better for you if a great millstone were hung around your neck and you were thrown into the sea." And then Jesus adds another one of those very difficult to understand and seemingly harsh teachings. "If your hand causes you stumble, cut it off ..."
One pastor tells of having an after-church conversation with a teenage girl who admitted how much she was attracted to boys. "What part of me do I cut off?" she wanted to know. He tried to explain that Jesus was indulging in hyperbole. Exaggeration. To make a point.
Jesus was trying to teach his followers that they should let go of anything that kept them from being happy and the whole, healthy, joy-filled persons God created them to be.
If you have ever had surgery, you know that sometimes it is necessary to actually cut off or cut out one part of the body so the rest of the body will survive.
I became very ill when I was thirteen years old. At first my parents thought I had the flu, but I continued to get worse and finally they took me to the doctor, who quickly diagnosed acute appendicitis. He said if we had waited another hour my appendix would have ruptured and I could have developed gangrene and died. The solution was immediate surgery to cut out the inflamed organ. Now, this was very inconvenient because it was a few months before my freshman year and I was planning to be a star on the high school football team. I suffered many such delusions in those days. This was before soccer had been invented. Anyway, I elected to have the surgery and was later very glad that I did. It got me out of milking the cows and every other kind of heavy lifting for several weeks -- and when it came time for football practice to start I was sufficiently recovered to begin my very undistinguished career as a cornerback. I made one interception and no tackles in four years, although I still hold the team record for assists. I used to wait until several other tacklers had the runner almost down and then I would pile on.
Just as it is sometimes necessary to cut off part of the physical body to survive, it may also be necessary to let go of some habit, to give up some pleasure, to end a relationship, or to cut off something else in one's life that is very dear in order to survive spiritually.
A woman was interviewed on Good Morning America last week who had just resigned from an executive position in a major marketing firm so that she could spend more time at home with her children. She said, "It was not so much that my children needed me, but that I needed them."
I have a friend who gave up his job and opportunities for advancement in his career to stay home with his two sons. They had to scrimp and save to get by, but he said he wouldn't have traded that time with his kids for anything else because you can't get that time back. They are only children for a little while. After three years he went back to work and his wife gave up her job and opportunities for advancement to take her turn staying home with their children.
I came across a story this week about a mother who loved to cook with a huge cast-iron frying pan whenever the family went camping. She had had that pan as far back as anyone could remember and it worked particularly well over an open flame. She loved to cook bacon and flapjacks, and she was a wonderful cook.
One day when the family was camping in northern Ontario, this mom was cooking with her favorite skillet over a lovely crackling fire on a rock right at the edge of the lake where the edge dropped right down into the depths of the water. She was cooking away when she stood up with the pan in her hand, and stepped back for some reason and toppled right over the rock face into the deep water. She was a pretty good swimmer, but she struggled and struggled and couldn't keep her head above water. Her husband yelled out to her, "Let go of the frying pan." She did -- and the pan sank into the depths below and was never seen again, but she survived.
What do you need to let go of to survive, to be a whole and healthy person, physically, emotionally, and spiritually? What's holding you back, to paraphrase the United States Army, from "being all that you can be"?
One of the soccer moms who called in to the Tom Clark show, a mom with three kids in soccer who also happens to be a Sunday school teacher here in Wauwatosa, said, "Families are desperate for down time." She said, "it takes about five hours a week to get one child to soccer practices and games; multiply that by three and you've given up 15 hours." Her youngest son, she added, is seven years old. He sometimes has three games during a soccer tournament. "The impact of all of this on our lives is insane. It's not good for the kids and it's not good for us."
Hooray for Debbie Leech, who said "never again" after her oldest daughter played in a soccer tournament last Sunday morning in Waukesha at the same time their family usually attended worship. Her two sons had to miss practice for a church musical because Dad was out of town and the family had to choose between church and soccer. Debbie wrote in a letter appearing in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel that "the organizers of this and other tournaments seem to be missing the point. It is wrong to make families feel they have to choose between a sport and religious worship. There is plenty of time in the week for both. In the future," Debbie declared, "we will be in the church on Sunday instead of the lawn chairs at the soccer field."
Bill Gromacki, who serves on the board of the Brookfield Soccer Association, summed it all up very well in the statement that Tom Held quoted in the first Journal-Sentinel article. Bill said he wonders at times whether religion and family togetherness have been overwhelmed by the magnitude of organized soccer and other children's activities. "The benefits of competition and family togetherness are there," Gromacki said, "but they may cost too much."
If your soccer ball causes you to stumble...? No, don't cut it off. Find a way for your children to have fun playing soccer that doesn't cost too much. I believe this will be easier as a result of the community dialogue we have had about this issue. Mark Botterill, executive director of the Milwaukee Kickers, wrote to the Wauwatosa Clergy Association in response to our recent letter that their organization would do their very best to avoid scheduling conflicts on Sunday mornings.
In an article in the October, 1997 edition of The Lutheran magazine, Donna Schaper writes: "We don't have to put down soccer to lift up faith." She recommends that soccer parents and players get organized and speak out about this issue. "An important community conversation happens when 'time' becomes a subject. The church acts for God and God's sacred message, instead of just its slot." Then she adds, "People of different religious backgrounds can join in support for remembering the Sabbath."
If your gun offends you ... well, that's a soccer ball of a different color.
If your gun causes you to stumble, melt it down, Charlton Heston's impassioned pleas for the freedom to bear arms notwithstanding. Chuck may have played the definitive Moses in The Ten Commandments, but in this one he is on the wrong side of the Red Sea.
Unlimited access to guns of all kinds is an American tradition, an American attitude that we need to cut off so our children will not have to live every day in fear for their lives. In a recent Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel article, one Milwaukee Public Schools teacher told of coming back from a vacation and asking a boy in her class how his vacation was, and hearing his matter-of-fact and unemotional response, "I survived."
I come from a family of hunters and sports enthusiasts. Having guns, all kinds of guns for hunting deer, rabbits, squirrels, turkey, pheasant, ducks, and geese is a cherished right, a way of life where I grew up in Richland County. But I would give up that right and all of the joys of hunting in a Wisconsin minute if it would save one more child from dying of a gunshot wound on a Milwaukee street. I say that not as a pastor, not as a member of a clergy association, but as a scared parent. I am frightened -- more than I have ever been frightened in my life -- that the next time the phone rings it will be someone telling me that one of my own children has been shot.
My 13-year-old son called home late one Saturday night a few weeks ago to tell us that he had been delayed because he had to talk to the police about an incident involving broken glass and cuts on his face. He had been riding in the back seat of a car with friends at Tosa Fest when someone in another car yelled an obscenity at a big guy on the street. The big guy thought the obscenity came from the car my son was in. He came up to the car and put his fist through the window next to where my son was sitting. My son suffered some minor abrasions on his face. He and his friends reported the big guy to the police, and he was apprehended and is being appropriately charged. I breathed a sigh of relief when my son was safely home, because I knew it could have been much worse. It could have been a bullet that came through the window.
This is the text of a sermon preached at Wauwatosa Avenue United Methodist Church in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, September 28, 1997.
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An Invitation to Send Stories
We are collecting personal stories for a third volume in the vision series, to be released in 2004. The new working title is Shining Moments: Visions of the Holy in Ordinary Lives. If you have any stories to share of your personal experience of the holy, please send them to jsumwalt@naspa.net.
New Book Released
We are happy to report that the second volume in the vision series, Sharing Visions: Divine Revelations, Angels, and Holy Coincidences, is now available from CSS Publishing Company. For more information about the book click here or visit the CSS website at http://www.csspub.com.
Special Pricing for StoryShare Subscribers
Sharing Visions retails for $19.95. CSS has graciously agreed to make the book available to StoryShare subscribers for just $11.97 (plus shipping & handling). To take advantage of this special pricing, you must use the special code SS40SV. Simply e-mail your order to orders@csspub.com or phone 1-800-241-4056. If you live outside the U.S., phone 419-227-1818.
Praise for Sharing Visions
Bishop Richard Wilke, creator of the Disciple Bible Study series, writes: "I am rejoicing as I read the testimonies in Sharing Visions. What an inspiration! I recall my father, an unemotional man, telling me that his mother (who had died some years before) appeared to him in a dream and gave him counsel on a difficult decision he was wrestling with."
StoryShare, September 28, 2003, issue.
Copyright 2003 by CSS Publishing Company, Inc., Lima, Ohio.
All rights reserved. Subscribers to the StoryShare service may print and use this material as it was intended in sermons, in worship and classroom settings, in brief devotions, in radio spots, and as newsletter fillers. No additional permission is required from the publisher for such use by subscribers only. Inquiries should be addressed to permissions@csspub.com or to Permissions, CSS Publishing Company, Inc., P.O. Box 4503, Lima, Ohio 45802-4503
A Story to Live By: "Einstein's Youngest Student"
Sharing Visions: "The Other End of the Barrel" by Shirley Lochowitz
Good Stories: "One of These Little Ones" by John Sumwalt
Scrap Pile: "If Your Soccer Ball Causes You to Stumble, Shoot It!" by John Sumwalt
An Invitation to Send Stories
A Story to Live By
Einstein's Youngest Student
"... no one who does a deed of power in my name will be able soon afterward to speak evil of me."
Mark 9:39b
Albert Einstein was one of the most brilliant physicists and mathematicians who ever lived. He was also one of the most humble men who ever lived. One story about Einstein centers around a little girl who lived near Princeton University. She was having trouble with arithmetic, but suddenly began improving in the subject. Her mother inquired why. The girl said that she heard about a professor in town who was good at numbers, so she rang his doorbell one day to ask for help, and he'd been teaching her every day since. When the mother asked whether she knew his name, the little girl replied: "Not exactly; it's something like Einstein."
Editor's Note: One summer while Jo and I were attending a Summer Institute at Princeton Theological Seminary in Princeton, New Jersey, I sat next to a native who was auditing the class. She was a woman in her middle seventies who, like many Princetonians of her era, knew and loved Albert Einstein. She regaled me with several stories of the great man, including a personal tale of the day at the golf course when she almost beaned him with a golf ball.
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Sharing Visions
The Other End of the Barrel
by Shirley Lochowitz
"For everyone will be salted with fire. Salt is good; but if salt has lost its saltiness, how can you season it? Have salt in yourselves, and be at peace with one another."
Mark 9:49-50
Eight years ago, I was working as a police officer for the Caledonia, Wisconsin Police Department. On August 10, 1995, I was dispatched to a shooting call, only to learn on the way that the 12-year-old boy who had been shot was my son. He had been shot by his 14-year-old friend, who had been playing with a .22 rifle that his father had allowed him to keep loaded under his bed.
I was the first one on the scene. As I walked into the back of the house, I saw my son, Nick, sitting against the frame of the basement doorway. He had been shot in the stomach. I thought my son was going to die in front of me, that's how bad he looked.
After almost five hours of emergency surgery, my son was given only a 50% chance of living, because he had lost so much blood. Although I didn't know it at the time, this was a moment in which my whole life would be changed forever.
My son was in the hospital for a full week. He was very weak and he had lost a lot of weight. Things went smoothly for a while. Nick tried to get right back to normal, but I was so afraid for him that I remember just staring at him when he would fall asleep on the couch,. I could only be reassured that he was OK by seeing his chest rise and fall. I was so grateful to see that he was still breathing!
As time went on, my fears grew and grew. I decided that there was no way I could go back to police work, although after almost 14 years, my love for it was deep. But my fears were turning into panic attacks as my world grew smaller and smaller. I started having terrible nightmares about the shooting. I could not sleep or eat and I withdrew more and more. I could not face the people I worked with for fear that they would find me weak for not being able to return to police work. I found that alcohol took away the fear, helped me to sleep, and made me better able to cope. But soon even that didn't work. I was constantly overcome with fear -- dread -- of something terrible happening.
I now know, looking back, that I was extremely depressed. My whole world that I had known before the shooting was gone. It was not a safe place, and I was not in control, as I had thought so many times. Then, instead of taking the fear away, the alcohol made it worse. I needed help. It wasn't until I found a wonderful doctor that I was able to understand that these were truly symptoms of post-traumatic stress. What I saw when I walked into that home on that day jolted my soul onto a path where I never thought I would go.
I had been raised Catholic, but for many years I had questioned my faith. Where was God? How could I get to know him? Well, that has been the blessing of this shooting. It is how I truly came to know that God is always with me, sending me his love as I send it back to him.
You see, a short time after the shooting I started speaking out on the issue of safe gun storage. I have dedicated myself to educating others about how important it is, if you have a gun in your home, to keep it secured so that these types of shootings don't keep happening. Needless to say, it was not a very popular subject eight years ago. No one wanted to listen. But I have seen dramatic changes over the last few years. There have been many times when I have just wanted to quit, believing no one wanted to hear what I had to say. But then, one night I had a vision that changed my life.
I had gone to sleep and I found myself in a very dark spot, standing on the blacktop of my grade school parking lot, which is also the parking lot of the church. It was a sunny day, but suddenly it grew very, very dark with what looked like storm clouds, until it was pitch black. I was standing in complete darkness feeling full of fear. Then there was a small break in the clouds. As they began to part, a bright, rainbow-filled, glorious light came down and shone directly on me. Then a large, strong voice said, "Our Father is very proud of you." I am not sure whose voice it was ... maybe Jesus or an angel ... but at that moment I was enveloped in love, calmness, peace. If I close my eyes I can still feel it today. I woke up with a sense of knowing that God is with me and that this was the work I was to continue.
This happened a few years ago, but I have no doubt that I was spoken to, and I am convinced that this shooting happened for a reason. I am living out that reason by sharing our story and the message of safe gun storage. There have still been times when I have doubted and have asked God for a sign, and he has always, always come through. When I think of giving up I say to God, "Please, if you want me to continue, send me something," and the phone will ring that day or the next with someone looking for me to speak on safe gun storage. Even my husband said to me, "Geeze, how many times do you need to be shown?"
My experience truly makes my belief stronger that all things happen in Divine Order, and in their own time.
Shirley Lochowitz is the founder of The Other End of the Barrel, an organization that addresses the issue of safe gun storage. She and her son continue to share their story in the hopes that these types of shootings will cease to happen. They recently completed a The Other End of the Barrel video. Shirley is available for speaking engagements. Contact her by phone at 262-989-4288, or write to P.O. Box 98, Franksville, WI 53126. Her website is http://www.otherendofthebarrel.org/
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Good Stories
One of These Little Ones
by John Sumwalt
"If any of you put a stumbling block before one of these little ones who believe in me, it would be better for you if a great millstone were hung around your neck and you were thrown into the sea."
Mark 9:42
The patrolman heard three shots fired in rapid succession and started running toward the sound as fast as his middle-aged legs would carry him. He saw the gun first, lying on the ground next to a chain link fence, and then he saw the child lying in a pool of blood, face down on the sidewalk. He couldn't have been more than ten years old. The child had a faint pulse when the patrolman made the radio call for the ambulance, but he was dead within a few minutes.
The patrolman listened to the siren wail above the din of the traffic as he cradled the dead child's head in his lap. It was always the same. The investigation would reveal that the child got the gun from an older brother or a cousin who was a member of one of the neighborhood gangs. His parents would be shocked to hear that their baby had a gun, would deny that their good Christian son, who went to the corner church every Sunday and sang in the children's choir, could have pointed a loaded gun in anger at another boy. The patrolman had heard it all before. And that was why he would come back tonight -- after he had weeded the flower garden in his backyard and wept for this child, and after he had tucked his own little children into their beds -- to the basement of the church on the corner where community leaders met two nights a week, seeking ways to make the neighborhood safe for their children. Someday it would be different. Someday ...
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Scrap Pile
If Your Soccer Ball Causes You to Stumble, Shoot It!
by John Sumwalt
"If any of you put a stumbling block before one of these little ones who believe in me, it would be better for you if a great millstone were hung around your neck and you were thrown into the sea. If your hand causes you to stumble, cut it off; it is better for you to enter life maimed than to have two hands and go to hell, to the unquenchable fire."
Mark 9:42-43
I have been talking to members of the press all week about soccer on Sundays, this nice, safe, upper middle-class problem we have in the suburbs of Milwaukee. You wouldn't believe all of the attention we received "right here" in Wauwatosa after that polite, carefully-worded-so-as-not-to-be-too-controversial letter from our clergy association hit the media fan. There was a front-page article in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel with a couple of comments from yours truly, and as a result I was interviewed by two television stations for the evening news. The next morning, I was on Wisconsin Public Radio with Tom Clark from 6:00-7:00 a.m., talking about why I believe families shouldn't have to choose between soccer and worship on Sunday mornings, and responding to callers from all over the state. After breakfast, just as I was about to step into the shower, someone from the ABC radio network in New York called for a sound bite. He told me he agreed with our clergy association. He said he has been trying to get his boss to let him off on Sunday mornings so he can sing in his church choir. When I arrived at the church, the receptionist buzzed me and said someone from NBC News was on the phone. Then it was CBS, then a reporter from a London newspaper (not one of the sleazy tabloids that went after Princess Diana, he was quick to say), then it was CNN, then National Public Radio, then the reporter from the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel called back for a follow-up story which was to appear on the front page the next morning.
This is not a common occurrence in our little church office. Sometimes we go months, even decades, without a single call from anyone in the national media. And all the while I was thinking that this is important, but it pales in comparison to the anguish we all suffer in this city every time another child is gunned down in the street.
Someone said that the novelist William Faulkner was a "mythmaker who could differentiate between facts and truth." "Facts," he said, "can be looked at from different angles, but the truth is unassailable." One of the unassailable truths of this wonderful metropolitan area where we live, this beautiful city by the lake with all of its many cultural and economic opportunities, is that children, youth, and adults die here almost every week because guns of all kinds are available to everyone, including children.
A few weeks ago in one of the suburbs, two young boys, both less than 13 years old, were discovered playing cops and robbers with real loaded guns, one a .38 caliber handgun. Last week a 14-year-old boy was held up at gunpoint as he was riding his bike home from school. It happened at 64th and North, only a few blocks from the church where I serve as pastor and in front of the home of one of my parishioners. The Wauwatosa police arrested two teenaged youth and confiscated a loaded .45 caliber pistol.
Where do they get the guns? And where do they get the attitude, the values (or lack of values), that allows them to pull the trigger of a gun pointed in the direction of another human being? I used to love to play good guys and bad guys when I was a kid.
"I get to be Roy Rogers!"
"No, I want to be Roy Rogers, you were Roy Rogers last time. It's your turn to be a robber."
"Bang, you're dead."
It was great fun with our stick guns and cap guns and our imaginations because nobody was ever really dead.
Seventeen-year-old Shayla Johnson was shot dead last month as she drove through the Burger King parking lot on North 35th Street. Shayla's mother said she couldn't believe it when a guy at the scene called and said her daughter had just been shot in the head. She said, "I thought he was playing, because sometimes people play on the phone." So she told him she didn't believe him. Then he put Shayla's friend on the phone and she started screaming and crying. (Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, September 14, 1997)
It breaks my heart to tell that story. I can hardly bring myself to think about it, much less say it aloud.
Where do they get the guns?
The National Rifle Association has a slogan that "guns don't kill people, people kill people." That is a fact, an indisputable fact. It is an act of free will when a human finger pulls the trigger of a gun. But it is also an unassailable truth that having a gun makes it easy to kill. Too easy. When was the last time you heard about a drive-by knifing?
Jesus said, "If any of you put a stumbling block before one of these little ones ... it would be better for you if a great millstone were hung around your neck and you were thrown into the sea." And then Jesus adds another one of those very difficult to understand and seemingly harsh teachings. "If your hand causes you stumble, cut it off ..."
One pastor tells of having an after-church conversation with a teenage girl who admitted how much she was attracted to boys. "What part of me do I cut off?" she wanted to know. He tried to explain that Jesus was indulging in hyperbole. Exaggeration. To make a point.
Jesus was trying to teach his followers that they should let go of anything that kept them from being happy and the whole, healthy, joy-filled persons God created them to be.
If you have ever had surgery, you know that sometimes it is necessary to actually cut off or cut out one part of the body so the rest of the body will survive.
I became very ill when I was thirteen years old. At first my parents thought I had the flu, but I continued to get worse and finally they took me to the doctor, who quickly diagnosed acute appendicitis. He said if we had waited another hour my appendix would have ruptured and I could have developed gangrene and died. The solution was immediate surgery to cut out the inflamed organ. Now, this was very inconvenient because it was a few months before my freshman year and I was planning to be a star on the high school football team. I suffered many such delusions in those days. This was before soccer had been invented. Anyway, I elected to have the surgery and was later very glad that I did. It got me out of milking the cows and every other kind of heavy lifting for several weeks -- and when it came time for football practice to start I was sufficiently recovered to begin my very undistinguished career as a cornerback. I made one interception and no tackles in four years, although I still hold the team record for assists. I used to wait until several other tacklers had the runner almost down and then I would pile on.
Just as it is sometimes necessary to cut off part of the physical body to survive, it may also be necessary to let go of some habit, to give up some pleasure, to end a relationship, or to cut off something else in one's life that is very dear in order to survive spiritually.
A woman was interviewed on Good Morning America last week who had just resigned from an executive position in a major marketing firm so that she could spend more time at home with her children. She said, "It was not so much that my children needed me, but that I needed them."
I have a friend who gave up his job and opportunities for advancement in his career to stay home with his two sons. They had to scrimp and save to get by, but he said he wouldn't have traded that time with his kids for anything else because you can't get that time back. They are only children for a little while. After three years he went back to work and his wife gave up her job and opportunities for advancement to take her turn staying home with their children.
I came across a story this week about a mother who loved to cook with a huge cast-iron frying pan whenever the family went camping. She had had that pan as far back as anyone could remember and it worked particularly well over an open flame. She loved to cook bacon and flapjacks, and she was a wonderful cook.
One day when the family was camping in northern Ontario, this mom was cooking with her favorite skillet over a lovely crackling fire on a rock right at the edge of the lake where the edge dropped right down into the depths of the water. She was cooking away when she stood up with the pan in her hand, and stepped back for some reason and toppled right over the rock face into the deep water. She was a pretty good swimmer, but she struggled and struggled and couldn't keep her head above water. Her husband yelled out to her, "Let go of the frying pan." She did -- and the pan sank into the depths below and was never seen again, but she survived.
What do you need to let go of to survive, to be a whole and healthy person, physically, emotionally, and spiritually? What's holding you back, to paraphrase the United States Army, from "being all that you can be"?
One of the soccer moms who called in to the Tom Clark show, a mom with three kids in soccer who also happens to be a Sunday school teacher here in Wauwatosa, said, "Families are desperate for down time." She said, "it takes about five hours a week to get one child to soccer practices and games; multiply that by three and you've given up 15 hours." Her youngest son, she added, is seven years old. He sometimes has three games during a soccer tournament. "The impact of all of this on our lives is insane. It's not good for the kids and it's not good for us."
Hooray for Debbie Leech, who said "never again" after her oldest daughter played in a soccer tournament last Sunday morning in Waukesha at the same time their family usually attended worship. Her two sons had to miss practice for a church musical because Dad was out of town and the family had to choose between church and soccer. Debbie wrote in a letter appearing in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel that "the organizers of this and other tournaments seem to be missing the point. It is wrong to make families feel they have to choose between a sport and religious worship. There is plenty of time in the week for both. In the future," Debbie declared, "we will be in the church on Sunday instead of the lawn chairs at the soccer field."
Bill Gromacki, who serves on the board of the Brookfield Soccer Association, summed it all up very well in the statement that Tom Held quoted in the first Journal-Sentinel article. Bill said he wonders at times whether religion and family togetherness have been overwhelmed by the magnitude of organized soccer and other children's activities. "The benefits of competition and family togetherness are there," Gromacki said, "but they may cost too much."
If your soccer ball causes you to stumble...? No, don't cut it off. Find a way for your children to have fun playing soccer that doesn't cost too much. I believe this will be easier as a result of the community dialogue we have had about this issue. Mark Botterill, executive director of the Milwaukee Kickers, wrote to the Wauwatosa Clergy Association in response to our recent letter that their organization would do their very best to avoid scheduling conflicts on Sunday mornings.
In an article in the October, 1997 edition of The Lutheran magazine, Donna Schaper writes: "We don't have to put down soccer to lift up faith." She recommends that soccer parents and players get organized and speak out about this issue. "An important community conversation happens when 'time' becomes a subject. The church acts for God and God's sacred message, instead of just its slot." Then she adds, "People of different religious backgrounds can join in support for remembering the Sabbath."
If your gun offends you ... well, that's a soccer ball of a different color.
If your gun causes you to stumble, melt it down, Charlton Heston's impassioned pleas for the freedom to bear arms notwithstanding. Chuck may have played the definitive Moses in The Ten Commandments, but in this one he is on the wrong side of the Red Sea.
Unlimited access to guns of all kinds is an American tradition, an American attitude that we need to cut off so our children will not have to live every day in fear for their lives. In a recent Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel article, one Milwaukee Public Schools teacher told of coming back from a vacation and asking a boy in her class how his vacation was, and hearing his matter-of-fact and unemotional response, "I survived."
I come from a family of hunters and sports enthusiasts. Having guns, all kinds of guns for hunting deer, rabbits, squirrels, turkey, pheasant, ducks, and geese is a cherished right, a way of life where I grew up in Richland County. But I would give up that right and all of the joys of hunting in a Wisconsin minute if it would save one more child from dying of a gunshot wound on a Milwaukee street. I say that not as a pastor, not as a member of a clergy association, but as a scared parent. I am frightened -- more than I have ever been frightened in my life -- that the next time the phone rings it will be someone telling me that one of my own children has been shot.
My 13-year-old son called home late one Saturday night a few weeks ago to tell us that he had been delayed because he had to talk to the police about an incident involving broken glass and cuts on his face. He had been riding in the back seat of a car with friends at Tosa Fest when someone in another car yelled an obscenity at a big guy on the street. The big guy thought the obscenity came from the car my son was in. He came up to the car and put his fist through the window next to where my son was sitting. My son suffered some minor abrasions on his face. He and his friends reported the big guy to the police, and he was apprehended and is being appropriately charged. I breathed a sigh of relief when my son was safely home, because I knew it could have been much worse. It could have been a bullet that came through the window.
This is the text of a sermon preached at Wauwatosa Avenue United Methodist Church in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, September 28, 1997.
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An Invitation to Send Stories
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New Book Released
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Praise for Sharing Visions
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StoryShare, September 28, 2003, issue.
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