Hope On A Stick
Stories
Object:
Contents
What's Up This Week
"Hope on a Stick" by Keith Hewitt
"For the Ungodly" by John Sumwalt
"Mixed Metaphor" by C. David McKirachan
"I Love to Tell the Story" by C. David McKirachan
What's Up This Week
Unexpected gifts are often the best kind. They can have a unique and powerful impact on us. God gives us unexpected gifts all the time, as Keith Hewitt relates in "Hope on a Stick." Salvation and justification are gifts often given in unexpected ways and to unexpected people, as John Sumwalt illustrates in "For the Ungodly." C. David McKirachan shares how, as a child, he received the gift of direction and purpose in "Mixed Metaphor." In addition to receiving unexpected gifts, we can also give them. In "I Love to Tell the Story," McKirachan unexpectedly gives an elderly woman the gift of a voice, and receives a surprise gift in return.
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Hope on a Stick
Keith Hewitt
Genesis 18:1-15 (21:1-7)
My wife and I had been married for a couple of years when we decided that it was time to have a child. This was not a decision we arrived at prayerfully, after much thought and deliberation -- it just seemed like the thing to do. We assumed it would be pretty easy, since couples have been doing it for thousands of generations, and anything they could do back in the Stone Age was something we could do better and more efficiently, as educated, modern people.
So we consulted the calendar (my wife is a teacher, and hoped to schedule the next generation around her school year) and stopped trying not to get pregnant when the time was right. Soon, it appeared as though Rachel might be pregnant, so we purchased a home pregnancy test (one of those stick things), and she took the test the next day. We spent the next twenty minutes or so studying the stick, trying to match up the color to the results chart on the box... and decided that the test was inconclusive. (The fact that I am renowned in our family for having the color sense of a beagle didn't help.)
By the next day, we knew she wasn't.
The same thing happened next month, although we chose a different test, hoping it would be easier to read. The new test was easier to read -- and it showed that she was not pregnant. Again.
For the next year, we settled into a regular routine of waiting what seemed like a reasonable time, then buying a test, using it, and spending the next five or ten minutes living in a dream world, wondering what it would be like if this was the time it finally happened. Eventually, Rachel started sneaking out of the bedroom in the morning, so I wouldn't be awake while she did the test. Sometimes I woke up anyway, but pretended to sleep so she would not have to say anything when she came back, disappointed.
After a year or so, we started to indulge in just about any whacky old wives' tale that seemed remotely reasonable. (I am convinced that there are no old wives involved in these tales, just a committee of people somewhere with a highly refined sense of the absurd.) Another year passed, with anticipation and disappointment circling our lives each month like a very short-period comet making regular calls as a harbinger of bad news.
Eventually, being the reasonable people we were, we decided it was time to find out if there was some medical reason for our failure to get pregnant. Since Rachel's affinity for doctors is not quite as strong as her desire to get poked in the eye with a compass, we "decided" that I would be the first to go. I didn't have a regular doctor, let alone a specialist, so I scheduled an appointment with my mother-in-law's doctor -- a Cuban gentleman who had apparently fled the mother country one step ahead of Fidel.
I explained the problem, and he scheduled me for a test the following week. After a somewhat demoralizing, quick test to start my morning, I received a call later that afternoon; the doctor wanted me to come in for another appointment. He greeted me with false good cheer, and then rapidly got down to business.
"This is what you need to have," he said in a thick Cuban accent, hurriedly writing numbers on the white paper cover he had pulled down over the exam table; the number had a lot of zeroes, I noticed. "And this is what you've got," he added, writing a number with fewer zeroes. He looked at me sympathetically; I just nodded dumbly. He went on, "Not only that, but they're lazy. Most of them, they don't do nothing."
"I see," I said, and thought about apologizing. His tone seemed to suggest that I should.
"Not gonna happen," he concluded.
"I see," I repeated, and wilted inside.
We talked for a while about what could be done. He scheduled me for a series of shots, which he said might help. Getting an injection every day for a month wasn't my idea of a good time, but at that point I would have been willing to do anything. I agreed, and we scheduled the first shot for the following week.
It was a long month. The doctor's office was closed for a week, while he was on vacation. I enlisted my sister-in-law to give me the shots; I would stop by on the way home from work, and she would jab me in one arm or the other. I think she may have enjoyed it, but even she cringed when she hit bone one day.
A month of shots, a couple of weeks to see what would happen -- and then another test. He didn't bother to have me come in this time; I struggled to understand him over the phone. "The shots, they didn't do what we expected," he said.
"No?"
"No. I don't see any difference." He rattled off some numbers; I jotted them down, because I had to do something with my hands while the world slid slowly out from under me.
"I see." Pause. "So do we do another round of shots?"
"I think no. They had no effect."
"I see."
"There's nothing we can do," he said, and sounded a little sad. "You cannot get her pregnant. It's not gonna happen."
"Right. Thank you," I said, not meaning it, and hung up the phone.
Rachel took it about the same as me, and we began to think about a future without children. I moped, when I had time to think about it, and found that wallowing in self-pity only bred (pardon the term) more self-pity as I adjusted to the fact that I would never be a father. Rachel, on the other hand, prayed.
And prayed.
She took all the hope, all the desire, all the raw want, and poured it into her prayers. We stopped with the old wives' tales, stopped with the tests, stopped... well, stopped almost everything.
And so it was that, out of the blue, a month or two after my hopes had been dashed, I was sitting at the kitchen table when Rachel came out of the bathroom and said in a hushed voice, "I think I'm pregnant."
I just looked at her.
"Look," she said, and held out the stick. This time, there was no squinting, no holding it up to the light, no struggling to match shades of color to a box. It was clear, and unequivocal.
I wouldn't believe it. Neither of us did, because we wanted to, so badly. We trekked to the local drugstore, bought another "any time" test and she took it again. The answer was the same as before.
It wasn't until she came out from her doctor's office, and held up a "Getting ready for your baby" pamphlet to my car window, that I believed. God had blessed us, when science said it could not be. Some eight months later, I had the privilege of standing in the delivery room as a miracle breathed life before me.
It changed my life; it changed my future; it changed my relationship with God.
Keith Hewitt is the author of NaTiVity Dramas: Four Nontraditional Christmas Plays for All Ages. He is a lay speaker, co-youth leader, and former Sunday school teacher at Wilmot United Methodist Church in Wilmot, Wisconsin. He lives in southeastern Wisconsin with his wife and two children, and works in the IT Department at a major public safety testing organization.
For the Ungodly
John Sumwalt
For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. Indeed rarely will anyone die for a righteous person -- though perhaps for a good person someone might actually dare to die. But God proves his love for us that while we still were sinners Christ died for us.
-- Romans 5:6
There is a small village just down the road from the dairy farm where I grew up. Across the highway from where our little white church used to be is a steep road that leads up to the cemetery. About four yards up the sloping hill from my father's grave, and those of my grandparents, are the graves of Mabel and Irvin Greenfield.
Irv had been an old bachelor farmer, well into his fifties when he met and married a widow from over in Hell Hollow named Mabel Murphy. For all of his life until then, Irv had lived with his mother on a small farm up in Happy Hollow. (I am not making this up. You can find both these places on the map.) When his mother died, Irv had continued living in the same way, caring for a few cows and horses, and hauling cattle for area farmers. That was the way he made his living. When Dad needed to send a load of steers to market, or if he needed to have a cow hauled home from an auction, he would call Irv, as did hundreds of other farmers in that part of the state.
Everybody knew Irv and loved him for his reliability, honesty, salty language, chewing tobacco, and rugged cattle trucker ways. He was a big man, always dressed in bib overalls, denim shirt, and an old engineer's hat. He was also known for his colorful behavior. "That Irv, he's quite a character," people would say, and then they would tell about one of his antics.
One of the favorite stories that was told and retold was about the time Irv was eating his lunch in the cab of the truck as he drove home from the auction barn in town. When he finished eating, he threw the bag and wrappers out of the window. At the same time, he happened to look in the rearview mirror and saw a state trooper directly behind him. Before the trooper could turn on his red lights, Irv grabbed his old hat, threw it out the window, stopped the truck, gathered up his hat and the bag and the wrappers, got back into the truck, and drove on as if he was the most environmentally conscientious citizen in the county.
Irv's whole life revolved around the farm and his cattle trucking. He never went to church except maybe to a pancake supper or a funeral, and even then, he never stayed any longer than he had to. I remember seeing him briefly one night at the wake of another well-known cattle trucker. Irv came into the funeral home for about five minutes, spoke quickly to the family, went right back out, and sat in the cab of his truck across the street with the window down the whole rest of the evening, spitting tobacco juice and talking to his neighbors and friends.
When word got out that Irv had married the widow Murphy, it is not an overstatement to say that everyone in the community was shocked -- first of all because no one thought that Irv would ever get married, and secondly, because it was difficult to imagine that anyone woman in her right mind would want to marry him. The fact that Mabel Murphy was one of the most devoted members of the church, the teacher of the adult Sunday school class no less, and perhaps the most judgmental religious person any of us knew, made this unexpected union all the more strange.
Mabel was one of God's enforcers on earth. She laid out the rules for Christian living as if she had gotten them directly from God. Regular church attendance, which included Wednesday night prayer meetings, not smoking or chewing, not drinking or gambling or dancing, not working or shopping on Sunday, not wearing your skirt too short if you were a girl or your hair too long if you were a boy; all of these nots along with proper language and right thinking determined who was a candidate for heaven and who was clearly on the road to hell. There was no middle ground. Mabel had more commandments than God. She always made me feel like I never quite lived up to being a real Christian and probably never would.
I think almost everyone, even other regular church goers, preferred Irv's company to Mabel's. Irv was never judgmental. He took you pretty much as you were and would give you the shirt off his back if he thought you needed it more than he did. This is not to suggest that Irv was an all-around good guy who didn't have any flaws. I saw him angry and downright mean in the way he used his electric cattle prod on uncooperative steers on more than one occasion.
How Mabel and Irv resolved these differences in worldviews and behaviors no one ever knew. They seemed to have gotten along well for the twenty odd years that they lived together up there in Happy Hollow. Neither changed much that anyone could tell. Mabel went to church regularly and taught the adult Sunday school class until the day she died, which happened to be on a Sunday. Irv continued not going to church and hauling cattle and all the spitting and cussing behavior that went with it until the day he died.
If it ever occurred to them that they were on different paths to eternity, they never spoke of it. Each time I walk by their graves I wonder if they are still together and if not, which one is in which place.
John E. Sumwalt is the lead pastor of Wauwatosa Avenue United Methodist Church in suburban Milwaukee. He is the author of ten books, including How to Preach the Miracles: Why People Don't Believe Them and What You Can Do About It, now available from CSS Publishing. John and his wife, Jo Perry-Sumwalt, were the editors of StoryShare from 2004-2006.
Mixed Metaphor
C. David McKirachan
Matthew 9:35--10:8
My father was a minister of the old school. What that meant was the entire family was part of the ministry. It was assumed. That meant we were all PK's -- preacher's kids. I remember wondering out loud to my mother why we were different than all the other families that I knew. They went away for weekends; they showed up at school stuff; they didn't get phone calls in the middle of dinner; they didn't have missionaries and homeless people living with them. I have to give credit to her. She didn't tell me I didn't understand. She didn't tell me that was just the way it was. She sat me down and talked about discipleship. I was about eight, so I don't remember all of what she said, but she ended up talking about being a passenger and being part of the crew. We were the crew. We had a job to do. Then she sang. I know that sounds corny, but that was Mom. She sang, "Let The Lower Lights Be Burning." At the time, I didn't register that she was mixing metaphors. The passenger crew thing had us on the boat, the hymn had us on the shore, but they were both about the sea and about boats, so it made sense to an eight-year-old.
It stuck. I got tired of it. I rebelled against it. I thought about making stained-glass windows for a while. But I kept remembering my status as part of the crew. Then I learned that the big part of the sanctuary is called the nave. It's the hold of the ship. We're the cargo. But I thought we were the crew.
Compassion is the center of our need. We are all like sheep without a shepherd. We are all scared and battered. How can we presume to be anything but loud in our desperation? Does all of this mean we're just more self-sufficient in our co-dependence?
He had compassion for the crowd. I think that included the disciples. He realized that these twelve guys were just as needy as the rest of the flock. But they had something that the rest of the bunch didn't. They listened to him. They believed in him. So in his compassion and love, he gave them something better than any pastoral care or sermon. He gave them a call to ministry. He knew that they would discover forgiveness by forgiving. He knew that they would discover miracles by performing them. He knew that they would discover courage by going out and confronting evil. He knew that they would discover the love of God by proclaiming it to the world. He knew that they would be embraced by his compassion by offering it to the shepherd-less flock.
I had a great childhood. I had something in my family that I wouldn't trade for all the "normality" available. Every time we sat down to eat, I knew that we belonged to the Lord and we'd been chosen to be his servants in everything we did.
Let the lower lights be burning, send a gleam across the way.
Some poor fainting, struggling seaman, you may rescue, you may save.
And in the process, you'll know the light of salvation by shining in the darkness. Pretty cool for a mixed metaphor.
I Love to Tell the Story
C. David McKirachan
Psalm 116:1-2, 12-19
I've always been a firm believer in the reality that people don't listen to ministers because, after all, we get paid to say this stuff. But when a lay person gets up and talks about their faith, then everybody sits forward and listens. They must mean what they say; they're volunteers. So, one of my strategies for evangelism has been to have a couple of Sundays during the year when we have individuals from the congregation speak about their faith journey and how God has touched their lives.
It's a great idea, but once in a while we have a hard time coming up with people to get up front and speak. After all, isn't that what we pay you for? So, being the creative, out-side-the-box thinker that I am... Anyway, I thought it would demonstrate to one and all how doable this whole thing was if I got a shut-in to talk. I'd record her speech and then play it through the sound system at the appropriate time.
There was a ninety-year-old who was just delightful. She enjoyed my visits and she always had some interesting and witty story to tell me about her life. She spent a lot of it in the church and had a good sense of humor (a rare combination sometimes) and so I'd learned a lot of quirky information about the church from her. Some of her viewpoints had helped me move through conflicts and power struggles. The song remains the same. So, I figured she'd be a great one to speak.
I described my idea and she pondered. "What will I say?" So I told her I'd ask her a few questions and she could just talk about her faith and the church and we'd see what we came up with. It went wonderfully. She laughed and at one point shed a tear of remembrance. Breaking into song, she did a couple bars of "I Love To Tell The Story." It was wonderful.
I played it in church and everyone agreed it was wonderful. Then everyone told me they wish they had the guts to do what she did. Maybe when they were ninety, they'd get that courageous. Sometimes I wonder why I don't scream.
So, with my head down, shuffling at the failure of my wonderful strategy, I took a recording of the service to her. She listened to the music and my sermon and then came the recording of her recorded voice. It was scratchy and less than clear. Sound engineer I'm not. As I fiddled with the controls I saw she was weeping. Her testimony ended and I hit stop. "What's wrong?"
She looked at me and I'd swear she was twenty years, no, seventy years younger. "I did it." "You did what?" "I did what the Lord commanded. He told us to go and tell the world. I never had the chance. No one ever asked me. Now, I did it." She looked me square in the face. "You gave me such a gift. You'll never know."
All my strategies and outside-the-box manipulations fell away. All my desire to scream at reluctant speakers evaporated in the presence of a dream come true. When I did her funeral about a year later, we sang "I Love To Tell The Story." Funny thing, I've never had a hard time finding people to testify since then. Maybe she healed me.
C. David McKirachan is pastor of the Presbyterian Church at Shrewsbury in central New Jersey. He also teaches at Monmouth University. He is the author of I Happened Upon a Miracle and A Year of Wonder (Westminster John Knox).
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StoryShare, June 15, 2008, issue.
Copyright 2008 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., 517 South Main Street, Lima, Ohio 45804.
What's Up This Week
"Hope on a Stick" by Keith Hewitt
"For the Ungodly" by John Sumwalt
"Mixed Metaphor" by C. David McKirachan
"I Love to Tell the Story" by C. David McKirachan
What's Up This Week
Unexpected gifts are often the best kind. They can have a unique and powerful impact on us. God gives us unexpected gifts all the time, as Keith Hewitt relates in "Hope on a Stick." Salvation and justification are gifts often given in unexpected ways and to unexpected people, as John Sumwalt illustrates in "For the Ungodly." C. David McKirachan shares how, as a child, he received the gift of direction and purpose in "Mixed Metaphor." In addition to receiving unexpected gifts, we can also give them. In "I Love to Tell the Story," McKirachan unexpectedly gives an elderly woman the gift of a voice, and receives a surprise gift in return.
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Hope on a Stick
Keith Hewitt
Genesis 18:1-15 (21:1-7)
My wife and I had been married for a couple of years when we decided that it was time to have a child. This was not a decision we arrived at prayerfully, after much thought and deliberation -- it just seemed like the thing to do. We assumed it would be pretty easy, since couples have been doing it for thousands of generations, and anything they could do back in the Stone Age was something we could do better and more efficiently, as educated, modern people.
So we consulted the calendar (my wife is a teacher, and hoped to schedule the next generation around her school year) and stopped trying not to get pregnant when the time was right. Soon, it appeared as though Rachel might be pregnant, so we purchased a home pregnancy test (one of those stick things), and she took the test the next day. We spent the next twenty minutes or so studying the stick, trying to match up the color to the results chart on the box... and decided that the test was inconclusive. (The fact that I am renowned in our family for having the color sense of a beagle didn't help.)
By the next day, we knew she wasn't.
The same thing happened next month, although we chose a different test, hoping it would be easier to read. The new test was easier to read -- and it showed that she was not pregnant. Again.
For the next year, we settled into a regular routine of waiting what seemed like a reasonable time, then buying a test, using it, and spending the next five or ten minutes living in a dream world, wondering what it would be like if this was the time it finally happened. Eventually, Rachel started sneaking out of the bedroom in the morning, so I wouldn't be awake while she did the test. Sometimes I woke up anyway, but pretended to sleep so she would not have to say anything when she came back, disappointed.
After a year or so, we started to indulge in just about any whacky old wives' tale that seemed remotely reasonable. (I am convinced that there are no old wives involved in these tales, just a committee of people somewhere with a highly refined sense of the absurd.) Another year passed, with anticipation and disappointment circling our lives each month like a very short-period comet making regular calls as a harbinger of bad news.
Eventually, being the reasonable people we were, we decided it was time to find out if there was some medical reason for our failure to get pregnant. Since Rachel's affinity for doctors is not quite as strong as her desire to get poked in the eye with a compass, we "decided" that I would be the first to go. I didn't have a regular doctor, let alone a specialist, so I scheduled an appointment with my mother-in-law's doctor -- a Cuban gentleman who had apparently fled the mother country one step ahead of Fidel.
I explained the problem, and he scheduled me for a test the following week. After a somewhat demoralizing, quick test to start my morning, I received a call later that afternoon; the doctor wanted me to come in for another appointment. He greeted me with false good cheer, and then rapidly got down to business.
"This is what you need to have," he said in a thick Cuban accent, hurriedly writing numbers on the white paper cover he had pulled down over the exam table; the number had a lot of zeroes, I noticed. "And this is what you've got," he added, writing a number with fewer zeroes. He looked at me sympathetically; I just nodded dumbly. He went on, "Not only that, but they're lazy. Most of them, they don't do nothing."
"I see," I said, and thought about apologizing. His tone seemed to suggest that I should.
"Not gonna happen," he concluded.
"I see," I repeated, and wilted inside.
We talked for a while about what could be done. He scheduled me for a series of shots, which he said might help. Getting an injection every day for a month wasn't my idea of a good time, but at that point I would have been willing to do anything. I agreed, and we scheduled the first shot for the following week.
It was a long month. The doctor's office was closed for a week, while he was on vacation. I enlisted my sister-in-law to give me the shots; I would stop by on the way home from work, and she would jab me in one arm or the other. I think she may have enjoyed it, but even she cringed when she hit bone one day.
A month of shots, a couple of weeks to see what would happen -- and then another test. He didn't bother to have me come in this time; I struggled to understand him over the phone. "The shots, they didn't do what we expected," he said.
"No?"
"No. I don't see any difference." He rattled off some numbers; I jotted them down, because I had to do something with my hands while the world slid slowly out from under me.
"I see." Pause. "So do we do another round of shots?"
"I think no. They had no effect."
"I see."
"There's nothing we can do," he said, and sounded a little sad. "You cannot get her pregnant. It's not gonna happen."
"Right. Thank you," I said, not meaning it, and hung up the phone.
Rachel took it about the same as me, and we began to think about a future without children. I moped, when I had time to think about it, and found that wallowing in self-pity only bred (pardon the term) more self-pity as I adjusted to the fact that I would never be a father. Rachel, on the other hand, prayed.
And prayed.
She took all the hope, all the desire, all the raw want, and poured it into her prayers. We stopped with the old wives' tales, stopped with the tests, stopped... well, stopped almost everything.
And so it was that, out of the blue, a month or two after my hopes had been dashed, I was sitting at the kitchen table when Rachel came out of the bathroom and said in a hushed voice, "I think I'm pregnant."
I just looked at her.
"Look," she said, and held out the stick. This time, there was no squinting, no holding it up to the light, no struggling to match shades of color to a box. It was clear, and unequivocal.
I wouldn't believe it. Neither of us did, because we wanted to, so badly. We trekked to the local drugstore, bought another "any time" test and she took it again. The answer was the same as before.
It wasn't until she came out from her doctor's office, and held up a "Getting ready for your baby" pamphlet to my car window, that I believed. God had blessed us, when science said it could not be. Some eight months later, I had the privilege of standing in the delivery room as a miracle breathed life before me.
It changed my life; it changed my future; it changed my relationship with God.
Keith Hewitt is the author of NaTiVity Dramas: Four Nontraditional Christmas Plays for All Ages. He is a lay speaker, co-youth leader, and former Sunday school teacher at Wilmot United Methodist Church in Wilmot, Wisconsin. He lives in southeastern Wisconsin with his wife and two children, and works in the IT Department at a major public safety testing organization.
For the Ungodly
John Sumwalt
For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. Indeed rarely will anyone die for a righteous person -- though perhaps for a good person someone might actually dare to die. But God proves his love for us that while we still were sinners Christ died for us.
-- Romans 5:6
There is a small village just down the road from the dairy farm where I grew up. Across the highway from where our little white church used to be is a steep road that leads up to the cemetery. About four yards up the sloping hill from my father's grave, and those of my grandparents, are the graves of Mabel and Irvin Greenfield.
Irv had been an old bachelor farmer, well into his fifties when he met and married a widow from over in Hell Hollow named Mabel Murphy. For all of his life until then, Irv had lived with his mother on a small farm up in Happy Hollow. (I am not making this up. You can find both these places on the map.) When his mother died, Irv had continued living in the same way, caring for a few cows and horses, and hauling cattle for area farmers. That was the way he made his living. When Dad needed to send a load of steers to market, or if he needed to have a cow hauled home from an auction, he would call Irv, as did hundreds of other farmers in that part of the state.
Everybody knew Irv and loved him for his reliability, honesty, salty language, chewing tobacco, and rugged cattle trucker ways. He was a big man, always dressed in bib overalls, denim shirt, and an old engineer's hat. He was also known for his colorful behavior. "That Irv, he's quite a character," people would say, and then they would tell about one of his antics.
One of the favorite stories that was told and retold was about the time Irv was eating his lunch in the cab of the truck as he drove home from the auction barn in town. When he finished eating, he threw the bag and wrappers out of the window. At the same time, he happened to look in the rearview mirror and saw a state trooper directly behind him. Before the trooper could turn on his red lights, Irv grabbed his old hat, threw it out the window, stopped the truck, gathered up his hat and the bag and the wrappers, got back into the truck, and drove on as if he was the most environmentally conscientious citizen in the county.
Irv's whole life revolved around the farm and his cattle trucking. He never went to church except maybe to a pancake supper or a funeral, and even then, he never stayed any longer than he had to. I remember seeing him briefly one night at the wake of another well-known cattle trucker. Irv came into the funeral home for about five minutes, spoke quickly to the family, went right back out, and sat in the cab of his truck across the street with the window down the whole rest of the evening, spitting tobacco juice and talking to his neighbors and friends.
When word got out that Irv had married the widow Murphy, it is not an overstatement to say that everyone in the community was shocked -- first of all because no one thought that Irv would ever get married, and secondly, because it was difficult to imagine that anyone woman in her right mind would want to marry him. The fact that Mabel Murphy was one of the most devoted members of the church, the teacher of the adult Sunday school class no less, and perhaps the most judgmental religious person any of us knew, made this unexpected union all the more strange.
Mabel was one of God's enforcers on earth. She laid out the rules for Christian living as if she had gotten them directly from God. Regular church attendance, which included Wednesday night prayer meetings, not smoking or chewing, not drinking or gambling or dancing, not working or shopping on Sunday, not wearing your skirt too short if you were a girl or your hair too long if you were a boy; all of these nots along with proper language and right thinking determined who was a candidate for heaven and who was clearly on the road to hell. There was no middle ground. Mabel had more commandments than God. She always made me feel like I never quite lived up to being a real Christian and probably never would.
I think almost everyone, even other regular church goers, preferred Irv's company to Mabel's. Irv was never judgmental. He took you pretty much as you were and would give you the shirt off his back if he thought you needed it more than he did. This is not to suggest that Irv was an all-around good guy who didn't have any flaws. I saw him angry and downright mean in the way he used his electric cattle prod on uncooperative steers on more than one occasion.
How Mabel and Irv resolved these differences in worldviews and behaviors no one ever knew. They seemed to have gotten along well for the twenty odd years that they lived together up there in Happy Hollow. Neither changed much that anyone could tell. Mabel went to church regularly and taught the adult Sunday school class until the day she died, which happened to be on a Sunday. Irv continued not going to church and hauling cattle and all the spitting and cussing behavior that went with it until the day he died.
If it ever occurred to them that they were on different paths to eternity, they never spoke of it. Each time I walk by their graves I wonder if they are still together and if not, which one is in which place.
John E. Sumwalt is the lead pastor of Wauwatosa Avenue United Methodist Church in suburban Milwaukee. He is the author of ten books, including How to Preach the Miracles: Why People Don't Believe Them and What You Can Do About It, now available from CSS Publishing. John and his wife, Jo Perry-Sumwalt, were the editors of StoryShare from 2004-2006.
Mixed Metaphor
C. David McKirachan
Matthew 9:35--10:8
My father was a minister of the old school. What that meant was the entire family was part of the ministry. It was assumed. That meant we were all PK's -- preacher's kids. I remember wondering out loud to my mother why we were different than all the other families that I knew. They went away for weekends; they showed up at school stuff; they didn't get phone calls in the middle of dinner; they didn't have missionaries and homeless people living with them. I have to give credit to her. She didn't tell me I didn't understand. She didn't tell me that was just the way it was. She sat me down and talked about discipleship. I was about eight, so I don't remember all of what she said, but she ended up talking about being a passenger and being part of the crew. We were the crew. We had a job to do. Then she sang. I know that sounds corny, but that was Mom. She sang, "Let The Lower Lights Be Burning." At the time, I didn't register that she was mixing metaphors. The passenger crew thing had us on the boat, the hymn had us on the shore, but they were both about the sea and about boats, so it made sense to an eight-year-old.
It stuck. I got tired of it. I rebelled against it. I thought about making stained-glass windows for a while. But I kept remembering my status as part of the crew. Then I learned that the big part of the sanctuary is called the nave. It's the hold of the ship. We're the cargo. But I thought we were the crew.
Compassion is the center of our need. We are all like sheep without a shepherd. We are all scared and battered. How can we presume to be anything but loud in our desperation? Does all of this mean we're just more self-sufficient in our co-dependence?
He had compassion for the crowd. I think that included the disciples. He realized that these twelve guys were just as needy as the rest of the flock. But they had something that the rest of the bunch didn't. They listened to him. They believed in him. So in his compassion and love, he gave them something better than any pastoral care or sermon. He gave them a call to ministry. He knew that they would discover forgiveness by forgiving. He knew that they would discover miracles by performing them. He knew that they would discover courage by going out and confronting evil. He knew that they would discover the love of God by proclaiming it to the world. He knew that they would be embraced by his compassion by offering it to the shepherd-less flock.
I had a great childhood. I had something in my family that I wouldn't trade for all the "normality" available. Every time we sat down to eat, I knew that we belonged to the Lord and we'd been chosen to be his servants in everything we did.
Let the lower lights be burning, send a gleam across the way.
Some poor fainting, struggling seaman, you may rescue, you may save.
And in the process, you'll know the light of salvation by shining in the darkness. Pretty cool for a mixed metaphor.
I Love to Tell the Story
C. David McKirachan
Psalm 116:1-2, 12-19
I've always been a firm believer in the reality that people don't listen to ministers because, after all, we get paid to say this stuff. But when a lay person gets up and talks about their faith, then everybody sits forward and listens. They must mean what they say; they're volunteers. So, one of my strategies for evangelism has been to have a couple of Sundays during the year when we have individuals from the congregation speak about their faith journey and how God has touched their lives.
It's a great idea, but once in a while we have a hard time coming up with people to get up front and speak. After all, isn't that what we pay you for? So, being the creative, out-side-the-box thinker that I am... Anyway, I thought it would demonstrate to one and all how doable this whole thing was if I got a shut-in to talk. I'd record her speech and then play it through the sound system at the appropriate time.
There was a ninety-year-old who was just delightful. She enjoyed my visits and she always had some interesting and witty story to tell me about her life. She spent a lot of it in the church and had a good sense of humor (a rare combination sometimes) and so I'd learned a lot of quirky information about the church from her. Some of her viewpoints had helped me move through conflicts and power struggles. The song remains the same. So, I figured she'd be a great one to speak.
I described my idea and she pondered. "What will I say?" So I told her I'd ask her a few questions and she could just talk about her faith and the church and we'd see what we came up with. It went wonderfully. She laughed and at one point shed a tear of remembrance. Breaking into song, she did a couple bars of "I Love To Tell The Story." It was wonderful.
I played it in church and everyone agreed it was wonderful. Then everyone told me they wish they had the guts to do what she did. Maybe when they were ninety, they'd get that courageous. Sometimes I wonder why I don't scream.
So, with my head down, shuffling at the failure of my wonderful strategy, I took a recording of the service to her. She listened to the music and my sermon and then came the recording of her recorded voice. It was scratchy and less than clear. Sound engineer I'm not. As I fiddled with the controls I saw she was weeping. Her testimony ended and I hit stop. "What's wrong?"
She looked at me and I'd swear she was twenty years, no, seventy years younger. "I did it." "You did what?" "I did what the Lord commanded. He told us to go and tell the world. I never had the chance. No one ever asked me. Now, I did it." She looked me square in the face. "You gave me such a gift. You'll never know."
All my strategies and outside-the-box manipulations fell away. All my desire to scream at reluctant speakers evaporated in the presence of a dream come true. When I did her funeral about a year later, we sang "I Love To Tell The Story." Funny thing, I've never had a hard time finding people to testify since then. Maybe she healed me.
C. David McKirachan is pastor of the Presbyterian Church at Shrewsbury in central New Jersey. He also teaches at Monmouth University. He is the author of I Happened Upon a Miracle and A Year of Wonder (Westminster John Knox).
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How to Share Stories
You have good stories to share, probably more than you know: personal stories as well as stories from others that you have used over the years. If you have a story you like, whether fictional or "really happened," authored by you or a brief excerpt from a favorite book, send it to StoryShare for review. Simply email the story to us at storyshare@sermonsuite.com.
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StoryShare, June 15, 2008, issue.
Copyright 2008 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., 517 South Main Street, Lima, Ohio 45804.
