Ole And Clarence
Stories
Object:
Or what king, going out to wage war against another king, will not sit down first and consider whether he is able with ten thousand to oppose the one who comes against him with twenty thousand?
Luke 14:31
Ole lived across the river from Clarence, whom he didn't like at all. They all the time were yelling across the river at each other. Ole would yell to Clarence, "If I had a vay to cross dis river, I'd come over dere an' beat you up good, yeah, sure, ya betcha by golly!" Clarence would dare him to try. This went on for years. Finally the state built a bridge across the river right there by their houses.
Ole's wife, Lena, says, "Now is your chance, Ole. Vy don't you go over dere an' beat up dat Clarence like you said you vould?"
Ole says, "Okay, by yimminy, I tink I vill do yust dat." Ole started for the bridge, but he saw a sign and stopped to read it, then he turned around and went back home.
Lena asked, "Vy did you come back?"
Ole said, "Lena, I tink I change my mind about beatin' up dat Clarence. You know, dey put a sign on da bridge dat says, 'Clarence is 13 ft. 6 in.' You know, he don't look near dat big ven I yell at him from across da river."
Shining Moments
Safe
by Claire Hunston
In your book were written all the days that were formed for me, when none of them as yet existed. How weighty to me are your thoughts, O God! How vast is the sum of them! I try to count them -- they are more than the sand; I come to the end -- I am still with you.
Psalm 139:16b-18
It was late September of 1990. My stepson, 37 years of age, was terminally ill with lung cancer, metastasized from other parts of his body that the disease had attacked first. His wife called us from their home in another city and told us the somber news. She was resigned, but ill at ease. I sensed her distress and desperately wanted to help. My husband and I prayed, then I prayed again and again, that there might still be a turnaround, or at the least that his wife might find some peace in her agony.
I went to our library to hunt down every book I could find that talked about healing or miracles, so I might better know how to pray. I brought home four or five that I thought might help -- two were by Bernie Siegel. I opened his book on miracles and read. If only some of those miraculous stories could apply to my stepson -- there were plenty of reasons why he should live and not die so young. For one, we all loved him, even more so, it seemed, as he was almost passing from our reach. My heart was overwhelmed with the possibility that a miracle could happen and that he would stay among us.
Suddenly I stopped reading, looked out beyond the patio door to the garden, and remembered how just two weeks earlier he had sat with us at the table and laughed gently as he shared a thought with his half-sister (our daughter) whom he had just come to know. She was 16 and she was so proud to call him her brother. The brief visit had been a dream fulfilled. I continued to read about another miracle, and I truly began to believe that it could happen to him, too.
Then it was there. My eyes were closed, but the vision was clear. He and his wife were walking through a green meadow, moving happily along, hand in hand, laughing as though without a care. Suddenly, before them appeared an abyss. He turned to her and indicated that he would have to continue while she would stay behind. In that instant, a sleeved arm from a gray shrouded figure moved toward him and gently swept him from her, back over the abyss and beyond, to disappear into a soft gray mist. She was gone, too. My heart seemed to stop. I was confused, but strangely at peace. I was greatly relieved and somehow comforted that he was safe. Now, what to say to her? I opened my eyes. There was no one else in the room, and I had to sort out what I had just seen. Was this just a dream or was it a foretelling of what was to come? Was I to interpret it to mean that he would die and that she would be all right with it? A few days later I called her. I told her about the vision, and although she was saddened, she was deeply touched, and she was able to be comforted. Knowing that he would be safe seemed better than worrying about the moment of his death. A few days later he was gone, and we traveled the long distance to be with her. We have not talked about the vision again, but we talked about him and about how he came to her at night, as if to talk, and then he'd be gone. She is now happily remarried.
For me it is a very wonderful memory from which I still gain a measure of peace.
Claire Hunston lives with her husband on the sheltered side of Vancouver Island, off the west coast of British Columbia. She had a sobering brush with death in an automobile accident in 1968. That (and her husband's illness) have resulted in frequent conversations about the process of dying. She now participates in an e-mail study of Julian of Norwich. A retired teacher who worked mostly as an ESL (English as a second language) teacher to children and adults from many countries, Claire still enjoys tutoring. She is on the pastoral care team and sings in the choir at the United Church of Canada congregation she attends, and she also helps with an interfaith soup kitchen, facilitates a Parkinson's support group, and writes letters for Amnesty International.
Good Stories
Whoever Comes to Me...
by Andrew Greeley
"Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple."
Luke 14:26
Andrew Greeley shared the following story in one of his weekly postings:
Once upon a time a young man who had been reported killed in action came home from a prisoner of war camp. His family and his buddies and even his girlfriend had mourned him as dead and then more or less got over their grief. His sudden reappearance was disconcerting, to say the least. They had all loved him, but they had in effect written him out of their lives. His girlfriend was engaged to marry someone else. Moreover, he didn't seem like the boy who had gone off to war. He was thin and haggard and haunted. However, he was now mature, self-possessed, and, astonishingly, happy. He hadn't smiled much as a kid and rarely joked. Now he was witty and ebullient all the time. A quiet kid had become an outgoing adult man. He didn't fit in the patterns of relationships he had left behind. Quite the contrary, his happiness and maturity were unsettling. He congratulated his former girlfriend on her coming marriage and shook hands cordially with the fiancé. There's something wrong with him, everyone said. His family went to the priest. There sure is, the priest said -- he has risen from the dead and now acts like a saint.
(Andrew M. Greeley, April 20, 2003, http://www.agreeley.com/hom03/april20.htm)
Scrap Pile
Mold Me?
by John Sumwalt
Then the word of the Lord came to me: Can I not do with you, O house of Israel, just as this potter has done? says the Lord. Just like clay in the potter's hand, so are you in my hand, O house of Israel.
Jeremiah 18:5-6
I have been thinking a lot lately about the meaning of life and death as my father sinks lower and lower in his battle with Parkinson's and heart disease. I reflect on his life story, as much of it as I know. I think about all that he means to me and all of our family. I cannot imagine life without him, without his frequent phone calls with updates about life on the farm and what's going on with neighbors and friends. I am saddened by his suffering, the loneliness of the nursing home, the physical and emotional pain as he experiences loss after loss of functions he has taken for granted all his life. I recoil at his bursts of anger. I understand the stages of dying, but knowing what's coming, and why, does not make it easier to bear for him or for me. He is not going "gentle into that dark night," and I am struggling with the meaning of it all.
We are going to pray a prayer by the psalmist in a few moments in which he writes:
"I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.... My frame was not hidden from you, when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth. Your eyes beheld my unformed substance. In your book were written all the days that were formed for me, when none of them as yet existed" (Psalm 139:14-16).
The psalmist is talking about where we come from, how we are formed by God.
The prophet Jeremiah is led by God to a potter's house, where he observes how the potter reworks the clay, how he starts over again when the vessel he is forming has a fatal flaw. And, he declares, just like the clay in the potter's hands, so are we in the hands of God.
Does this mean that we have no part in determining the direction of our lives?
Certainly not. Clay is resilient. Potters will tell you that it sometimes seems to have a will of its own, like human beings. It is not so much that the potter shapes the clay as it is that he works with it to discover what it will be.
When Michelangelo looked at a stone for sculpting he spoke of releasing that which was already there.
Still, there is something in us that rebels against the potter, the creator and shaper of our clay. We do evil. We exploit, we hurt others by our words and our deeds -- and even when we are doing good, we take all the credit for ourselves.
In this culture we are accustomed to thinking that we can "make something of ourselves" by hard work and ingenuity. We talk with pride of being a "self-made man," or a "liberated woman." When things go well we feel very self-sufficient. When things go wrong, when the stock market crashes or tragedy breaks into our lives, we dare to question God.
Two hundred twenty-nine people were killed when Swiss Air Flight 229 went down last week off the coast of Nova Scotia. The dead were from 15 different countries. "Former boxer Jake LaMotta lost his 49-year-old son, Joe, president of LaMotta Foods Inc. In February, the former middleweight champion lost his older son, Jake Jr., to cancer. 'My only two sons died in the same year,' LaMotta said.... 'What is God trying to tell me?' " (Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, September 5, 1998).
I want to ask questions of God like this about my dad. Why do you let him suffer so? Why can't you give him a few more good years? Why can't you let us have him for a little while longer?
The apostle Paul writes about this kind of questioning in his letter to the Roman church:
"But who indeed are you, a human being, to argue with God? Will what is molded say to the one who molds it, 'Why have you made me like this?' Has the potter the right over the clay, to make out of the same lump one object for special use and another for ordinary use?" (Romans 9:20-21).
In the acclaimed movie Cool Hand Luke, Paul Newman (in the title role) finds himself cornered in a church after escaping from a prison farm. As the bloodhounds close in outside the door and the guards prepare to gun him down, Luke looks toward the ceiling of the church and prays aloud: "Why did you make me like I am?"
Why did you make me like you, he is saying. The screenwriter is clearly aware that "I am" is the Hebrew name for God. When Moses asks God, during his call to lead his people out of slavery, "If I come to the Israelites and say to them, 'The God of your ancestors has sent me to you,' and they ask me, 'What is his name?' what shall I say to them?" God replies to Moses out of the burning bush: "I am who I am... Thus you shall say to the Israelites, 'I am has sent you to them.' "
"Why did you make me like 'I am'?"
Whatever we are, we are like God, created in the image of God. And because we are like God, free to create as we have been created, to shape things -- our lives and the lives of others -- as we have been shaped, we can, and sometimes do, shape evil instead of good.
Jeremiah pleads with the people of Israel, "Thus says the Lord: Look, I am a potter shaping evil against you and devising a plan against you. Turn now, all of you from your evil way, and amend your ways and your doings" (18:11b). Accept who and whose you are, he pleads.
It is difficult to be shaped again, to be remolded when we have become all bent out of shape. It is difficult to sing and truly mean what we are singing when we sing that wonderful old hymn that Adelaide Pollard wrote in 1907:
"Have thine own way, Lord! Have thine own way!
Thou art the Potter! I am the Clay!
Mold me and make me after they will!
While I am waiting, yielded and still!"
"Waiting, yielded and still"... How many of us are truly "waiting, yielded and still"?
The last time I visited my dad in his room at Pine Valley Manor, I found him in a sweeter mood, more malleable, the anger and defiant resistance against the relentless progression of the diseases that were slowly taking his life forgotten for a moment. His birds were singing in their cages and he was playing on his mouth organ another old hymn that I remember well. I sang with him and the birds as he played:
"Count your blessings, name them one by one,
Count your blessings, see what God has done,
Count your blessings, name them one by one,
Count your many blessings, see what God has done!"
Pray the psalm with me:
O Lord, you have searched me and known me. You know when I sit down and when I rise up; you discern my thoughts from far away. You search out my path and my lying down, and are acquainted with all my ways. Even before a word is on my tongue, O Lord, you know it completely. You hem me in, behind and before, and lay your hand upon me. Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is so high I cannot attain it.... For it was you who formed my inward parts; you knit me together in my mother's womb. I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works; that I know very well. My frame was not hidden from you, when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth. Your eyes beheld my unformed substance. In your book were written all the days that were formed for me, when none of them as yet existed. How weighty to me are your thoughts, O God! How vast is the sum of them! I try to count them -- they are more than the sand; I come to the end -- I am still with you.
(Psalm 139:1-6, 13-18)
This sermon was preached on September 6, 1998, at Wauwatosa Avenue United Methodist Church in Milwaukee. John's father, A. Leonard Sumwalt, passed over nine days later on September 15, just two weeks and a day short of his 81st birthday.
**********************************************
New Book
The third book in the vision series, Shining Moments: Visions of the Holy in Ordinary Lives (edited by John Sumwalt), is now available from CSS Publishing Company. Among the 60 contributing authors of these Chicken Soup for the Soul-like vignettes are Ralph Milton, Sandra Herrmann, Pamela J. Tinnin, Richard H. Gentzler Jr., David Michael Smith, Jodie Felton, Nancy Nichols, William Lee Rand, Gail Ingle, and Rosmarie Trapp, whose family story was told in the classic movie The Sound of Music. Click on the title above for information about how to order. The stories follow the lectionary for Cycle A, which begins in December.
Other Books by John & Jo Sumwalt
Sharing Visions: Divine Revelations, Angels, and Holy Coincidences
Vision Stories: True Accounts of Visions, Angels, and Healing Miracles
Life Stories: A Study in Christian Decision Making
Lectionary Stories: Forty Tellable Tales for Cycle C
Lectionary Stories: Forty Tellable Tales for Cycle A
Lectionary Stories: Forty Tellable Tales for Cycle B
Lectionary Tales for the Pulpit: 62 Stories for Cycle B
You can order any of our books on the CSS website (http://www.csspub.com); they are also available from www.amazon.com and at many Christian bookstores. Or 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.)
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StoryShare, September 5, 2004, issue.
Copyright 2004 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.
Luke 14:31
Ole lived across the river from Clarence, whom he didn't like at all. They all the time were yelling across the river at each other. Ole would yell to Clarence, "If I had a vay to cross dis river, I'd come over dere an' beat you up good, yeah, sure, ya betcha by golly!" Clarence would dare him to try. This went on for years. Finally the state built a bridge across the river right there by their houses.
Ole's wife, Lena, says, "Now is your chance, Ole. Vy don't you go over dere an' beat up dat Clarence like you said you vould?"
Ole says, "Okay, by yimminy, I tink I vill do yust dat." Ole started for the bridge, but he saw a sign and stopped to read it, then he turned around and went back home.
Lena asked, "Vy did you come back?"
Ole said, "Lena, I tink I change my mind about beatin' up dat Clarence. You know, dey put a sign on da bridge dat says, 'Clarence is 13 ft. 6 in.' You know, he don't look near dat big ven I yell at him from across da river."
Shining Moments
Safe
by Claire Hunston
In your book were written all the days that were formed for me, when none of them as yet existed. How weighty to me are your thoughts, O God! How vast is the sum of them! I try to count them -- they are more than the sand; I come to the end -- I am still with you.
Psalm 139:16b-18
It was late September of 1990. My stepson, 37 years of age, was terminally ill with lung cancer, metastasized from other parts of his body that the disease had attacked first. His wife called us from their home in another city and told us the somber news. She was resigned, but ill at ease. I sensed her distress and desperately wanted to help. My husband and I prayed, then I prayed again and again, that there might still be a turnaround, or at the least that his wife might find some peace in her agony.
I went to our library to hunt down every book I could find that talked about healing or miracles, so I might better know how to pray. I brought home four or five that I thought might help -- two were by Bernie Siegel. I opened his book on miracles and read. If only some of those miraculous stories could apply to my stepson -- there were plenty of reasons why he should live and not die so young. For one, we all loved him, even more so, it seemed, as he was almost passing from our reach. My heart was overwhelmed with the possibility that a miracle could happen and that he would stay among us.
Suddenly I stopped reading, looked out beyond the patio door to the garden, and remembered how just two weeks earlier he had sat with us at the table and laughed gently as he shared a thought with his half-sister (our daughter) whom he had just come to know. She was 16 and she was so proud to call him her brother. The brief visit had been a dream fulfilled. I continued to read about another miracle, and I truly began to believe that it could happen to him, too.
Then it was there. My eyes were closed, but the vision was clear. He and his wife were walking through a green meadow, moving happily along, hand in hand, laughing as though without a care. Suddenly, before them appeared an abyss. He turned to her and indicated that he would have to continue while she would stay behind. In that instant, a sleeved arm from a gray shrouded figure moved toward him and gently swept him from her, back over the abyss and beyond, to disappear into a soft gray mist. She was gone, too. My heart seemed to stop. I was confused, but strangely at peace. I was greatly relieved and somehow comforted that he was safe. Now, what to say to her? I opened my eyes. There was no one else in the room, and I had to sort out what I had just seen. Was this just a dream or was it a foretelling of what was to come? Was I to interpret it to mean that he would die and that she would be all right with it? A few days later I called her. I told her about the vision, and although she was saddened, she was deeply touched, and she was able to be comforted. Knowing that he would be safe seemed better than worrying about the moment of his death. A few days later he was gone, and we traveled the long distance to be with her. We have not talked about the vision again, but we talked about him and about how he came to her at night, as if to talk, and then he'd be gone. She is now happily remarried.
For me it is a very wonderful memory from which I still gain a measure of peace.
Claire Hunston lives with her husband on the sheltered side of Vancouver Island, off the west coast of British Columbia. She had a sobering brush with death in an automobile accident in 1968. That (and her husband's illness) have resulted in frequent conversations about the process of dying. She now participates in an e-mail study of Julian of Norwich. A retired teacher who worked mostly as an ESL (English as a second language) teacher to children and adults from many countries, Claire still enjoys tutoring. She is on the pastoral care team and sings in the choir at the United Church of Canada congregation she attends, and she also helps with an interfaith soup kitchen, facilitates a Parkinson's support group, and writes letters for Amnesty International.
Good Stories
Whoever Comes to Me...
by Andrew Greeley
"Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple."
Luke 14:26
Andrew Greeley shared the following story in one of his weekly postings:
Once upon a time a young man who had been reported killed in action came home from a prisoner of war camp. His family and his buddies and even his girlfriend had mourned him as dead and then more or less got over their grief. His sudden reappearance was disconcerting, to say the least. They had all loved him, but they had in effect written him out of their lives. His girlfriend was engaged to marry someone else. Moreover, he didn't seem like the boy who had gone off to war. He was thin and haggard and haunted. However, he was now mature, self-possessed, and, astonishingly, happy. He hadn't smiled much as a kid and rarely joked. Now he was witty and ebullient all the time. A quiet kid had become an outgoing adult man. He didn't fit in the patterns of relationships he had left behind. Quite the contrary, his happiness and maturity were unsettling. He congratulated his former girlfriend on her coming marriage and shook hands cordially with the fiancé. There's something wrong with him, everyone said. His family went to the priest. There sure is, the priest said -- he has risen from the dead and now acts like a saint.
(Andrew M. Greeley, April 20, 2003, http://www.agreeley.com/hom03/april20.htm)
Scrap Pile
Mold Me?
by John Sumwalt
Then the word of the Lord came to me: Can I not do with you, O house of Israel, just as this potter has done? says the Lord. Just like clay in the potter's hand, so are you in my hand, O house of Israel.
Jeremiah 18:5-6
I have been thinking a lot lately about the meaning of life and death as my father sinks lower and lower in his battle with Parkinson's and heart disease. I reflect on his life story, as much of it as I know. I think about all that he means to me and all of our family. I cannot imagine life without him, without his frequent phone calls with updates about life on the farm and what's going on with neighbors and friends. I am saddened by his suffering, the loneliness of the nursing home, the physical and emotional pain as he experiences loss after loss of functions he has taken for granted all his life. I recoil at his bursts of anger. I understand the stages of dying, but knowing what's coming, and why, does not make it easier to bear for him or for me. He is not going "gentle into that dark night," and I am struggling with the meaning of it all.
We are going to pray a prayer by the psalmist in a few moments in which he writes:
"I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.... My frame was not hidden from you, when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth. Your eyes beheld my unformed substance. In your book were written all the days that were formed for me, when none of them as yet existed" (Psalm 139:14-16).
The psalmist is talking about where we come from, how we are formed by God.
The prophet Jeremiah is led by God to a potter's house, where he observes how the potter reworks the clay, how he starts over again when the vessel he is forming has a fatal flaw. And, he declares, just like the clay in the potter's hands, so are we in the hands of God.
Does this mean that we have no part in determining the direction of our lives?
Certainly not. Clay is resilient. Potters will tell you that it sometimes seems to have a will of its own, like human beings. It is not so much that the potter shapes the clay as it is that he works with it to discover what it will be.
When Michelangelo looked at a stone for sculpting he spoke of releasing that which was already there.
Still, there is something in us that rebels against the potter, the creator and shaper of our clay. We do evil. We exploit, we hurt others by our words and our deeds -- and even when we are doing good, we take all the credit for ourselves.
In this culture we are accustomed to thinking that we can "make something of ourselves" by hard work and ingenuity. We talk with pride of being a "self-made man," or a "liberated woman." When things go well we feel very self-sufficient. When things go wrong, when the stock market crashes or tragedy breaks into our lives, we dare to question God.
Two hundred twenty-nine people were killed when Swiss Air Flight 229 went down last week off the coast of Nova Scotia. The dead were from 15 different countries. "Former boxer Jake LaMotta lost his 49-year-old son, Joe, president of LaMotta Foods Inc. In February, the former middleweight champion lost his older son, Jake Jr., to cancer. 'My only two sons died in the same year,' LaMotta said.... 'What is God trying to tell me?' " (Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, September 5, 1998).
I want to ask questions of God like this about my dad. Why do you let him suffer so? Why can't you give him a few more good years? Why can't you let us have him for a little while longer?
The apostle Paul writes about this kind of questioning in his letter to the Roman church:
"But who indeed are you, a human being, to argue with God? Will what is molded say to the one who molds it, 'Why have you made me like this?' Has the potter the right over the clay, to make out of the same lump one object for special use and another for ordinary use?" (Romans 9:20-21).
In the acclaimed movie Cool Hand Luke, Paul Newman (in the title role) finds himself cornered in a church after escaping from a prison farm. As the bloodhounds close in outside the door and the guards prepare to gun him down, Luke looks toward the ceiling of the church and prays aloud: "Why did you make me like I am?"
Why did you make me like you, he is saying. The screenwriter is clearly aware that "I am" is the Hebrew name for God. When Moses asks God, during his call to lead his people out of slavery, "If I come to the Israelites and say to them, 'The God of your ancestors has sent me to you,' and they ask me, 'What is his name?' what shall I say to them?" God replies to Moses out of the burning bush: "I am who I am... Thus you shall say to the Israelites, 'I am has sent you to them.' "
"Why did you make me like 'I am'?"
Whatever we are, we are like God, created in the image of God. And because we are like God, free to create as we have been created, to shape things -- our lives and the lives of others -- as we have been shaped, we can, and sometimes do, shape evil instead of good.
Jeremiah pleads with the people of Israel, "Thus says the Lord: Look, I am a potter shaping evil against you and devising a plan against you. Turn now, all of you from your evil way, and amend your ways and your doings" (18:11b). Accept who and whose you are, he pleads.
It is difficult to be shaped again, to be remolded when we have become all bent out of shape. It is difficult to sing and truly mean what we are singing when we sing that wonderful old hymn that Adelaide Pollard wrote in 1907:
"Have thine own way, Lord! Have thine own way!
Thou art the Potter! I am the Clay!
Mold me and make me after they will!
While I am waiting, yielded and still!"
"Waiting, yielded and still"... How many of us are truly "waiting, yielded and still"?
The last time I visited my dad in his room at Pine Valley Manor, I found him in a sweeter mood, more malleable, the anger and defiant resistance against the relentless progression of the diseases that were slowly taking his life forgotten for a moment. His birds were singing in their cages and he was playing on his mouth organ another old hymn that I remember well. I sang with him and the birds as he played:
"Count your blessings, name them one by one,
Count your blessings, see what God has done,
Count your blessings, name them one by one,
Count your many blessings, see what God has done!"
Pray the psalm with me:
O Lord, you have searched me and known me. You know when I sit down and when I rise up; you discern my thoughts from far away. You search out my path and my lying down, and are acquainted with all my ways. Even before a word is on my tongue, O Lord, you know it completely. You hem me in, behind and before, and lay your hand upon me. Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is so high I cannot attain it.... For it was you who formed my inward parts; you knit me together in my mother's womb. I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works; that I know very well. My frame was not hidden from you, when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth. Your eyes beheld my unformed substance. In your book were written all the days that were formed for me, when none of them as yet existed. How weighty to me are your thoughts, O God! How vast is the sum of them! I try to count them -- they are more than the sand; I come to the end -- I am still with you.
(Psalm 139:1-6, 13-18)
This sermon was preached on September 6, 1998, at Wauwatosa Avenue United Methodist Church in Milwaukee. John's father, A. Leonard Sumwalt, passed over nine days later on September 15, just two weeks and a day short of his 81st birthday.
**********************************************
New Book
The third book in the vision series, Shining Moments: Visions of the Holy in Ordinary Lives (edited by John Sumwalt), is now available from CSS Publishing Company. Among the 60 contributing authors of these Chicken Soup for the Soul-like vignettes are Ralph Milton, Sandra Herrmann, Pamela J. Tinnin, Richard H. Gentzler Jr., David Michael Smith, Jodie Felton, Nancy Nichols, William Lee Rand, Gail Ingle, and Rosmarie Trapp, whose family story was told in the classic movie The Sound of Music. Click on the title above for information about how to order. The stories follow the lectionary for Cycle A, which begins in December.
Other Books by John & Jo Sumwalt
Sharing Visions: Divine Revelations, Angels, and Holy Coincidences
Vision Stories: True Accounts of Visions, Angels, and Healing Miracles
Life Stories: A Study in Christian Decision Making
Lectionary Stories: Forty Tellable Tales for Cycle C
Lectionary Stories: Forty Tellable Tales for Cycle A
Lectionary Stories: Forty Tellable Tales for Cycle B
Lectionary Tales for the Pulpit: 62 Stories for Cycle B
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StoryShare, September 5, 2004, issue.
Copyright 2004 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.
