Ramps and Remembrance

Ten years ago today, my dad breathed his last.  His spirit finally left a body that had relentlessly wound down from the paralysis of ALS.  After a few months of a scratchy voice and an occasional stumble, from diagnosis to death took 18 months.  He was 71.

It was Easter weekend, this weekend back in 2006. We were all together in Virginia, and just as most of us came out of the Good Friday service my mom called to say hurry back.  He was ready to say goodbye.  And he did, sleeping then all the way through until Sunday night.  There was a thunderstorm around midnight, and he left us.  What a gift, to enact the rhythm of Easter, in a spiritual resurrection awaiting the final "we shall all be changed" restoration of perishable to imperishable.

That final gift to all of us who mourned merely completed an entire lifetime of giving.  My dad was the essence of generosity.  I think growing up on the edge of poverty as the youngest of 15 kids accentuated his pleasure in giving to others as his small construction company began to prosper.  He was practical, hard-working, NEVER in a hurry (much to our frustration at times), mischievous, proud of his daughters, relaxed, absolutely loyal.  He steadily lived by common sense sprinkled with extravagant surprises.

And though his business thrived in the bustle of Loudoun county transforming from small farms into a DC suburb, he and my mom always embraced their Appalachian roots.  We have this sabbatical home because he bought two farms near his family's original cabin-in-the-woods homestead. All his life he spent weekends, summers, vacations, all the time he could, back in this hollow.  And one of the things I heard about from him, and his brothers, was the legendary ramp, and the Pickens Ramp Festival.

Now, my dad and his brothers were big teasers, they had robust senses of humor.  So I kind of wonder if the ramp is something people talked about but didn't really eat (like lutefisk with the Scandinavians, which I naively learned the hard way when I married in).  Ramps are a wild spring green onion, foraged from the woods, a pungent celebration of seasonal survival and the promise of summer.  Eating large quantities, particularly raw, is said to lead to a notorious body odor.   My aunt did tell me that teachers would send kids home from school in April if they stank, so my dad's brothers tried to collect and consume as many as possible!  Small towns in West Virginia have dedicated celebrations of this vegetable.  And I always heard about the one in Pickens, which I understood to be further into the hills, the place the railroad came and went to.


The Pickens festival was yesterday, on this anniversary weekend.  And at a thrift shop in CA I had found a "ride to defeat ALS" bike jersey.  I've never had a bike jersey, because I've never been such an athlete, but I bought it.  So the idea formed, let's ride bikes to Pickens, eat the authentic local dinner prepared at the American Legion Hall, and ride back. A tribute to my dad, time to breathe in the countryside he loved, to celebrate his courageous exhausting months of struggle against ALS.  To taste our first ramps.

Only I didn't actually check the mileage until yesterday morning.  I vaguely thought it was more than ten . . . but 27 was kind of a shocker.  It was such a good plan though.  Scott and I used to bike 20 miles of prairie trails a quarter of a century ago when we were residents, young, and living in Chicago, if we ever got a Saturday intersection of days off.  Scott was appropriately skeptical, but I was predictably overly confident.  It will be fun!  And I figured we could pay someone with a pickup truck for a ride back, or Scott could ride back and pick me up in the car.

And so we set off just after noon.  The route climbed 3000 feet into the mountains, following ridges and dipping by streams, winding by hilltop churches and cemeteries.  Classic WV countryside, small farms and trailer homes, chickens and dogs, and long stretches of forest.  Problem was, most of the roads were gravel, and our progress was slow.  Seven deer startled, leaping in front of us.  A red-headed woodpecker bobbed between trees over my head; a fat bumblebee crossed an inch off the dirt.  We saw a red-tailed hawk settle into a tree over a grassy hollow, and paused to marvel at a beaver dam.  The final five miles nearly killed me, a long long endless gravel ascent.  But we made it to Pickens.  Which, it turns out, is not much more than an old RR station, a minuscule post office, two stores, and the American Legion Hall.

The dinner consisted of massive servings of ham, cornbread, fried potatoes, apple sauce, brown beans, cole slaw . . and ramps. We sat at long tables and talked to our grey-haired neighbors.  (Two of whom, it seemed, were just there for the social meal and did not wish to consume any ramps lest they offend their friends at church the next morning).  A cute little girl kept filling our styrofoam cups with pink lemonade.  We ate as much as our weary bodies could stand, and chatted with some people about alternative routes.  I felt
like I needed pavement to make it back even part-way before dark.

 Did I mention there was ZERO cell phone reception the entire route?  But my map worked, and at the encouragement of a guy who wandered helpfully to us as we stared at our phones, I elected a longer but more-traveled loop back through Helvitia.  Scott, who can do a 50-60 mile day much faster on his own than with me, decided to plow back the same way we came, thinking he'd have the best chance of making it home by dark and then he'd come find me with the car.

Long story short, we survived, and my longer-but-more-pavement route gave me enough speed to be within 4 miles of home by the time Scott looped back with the car.  The sun was just resting on the horizon in an 8 pm sphere of pink slanting through the road dust.  He said, you've got less than a mile until the long hill down from Big Bend, you can practically coast home, you can do it.  So I did.


So it was a day to remember my dad, to feel weakness and weariness and pray.  To inhale the beauty of a place he loved.  To eat a meal which for him would be the menu of Heaven. To hit physical limits, as he did, and press on.

Today is also my nephew's 18th birthday.  An while the take-me-home-country-roads tribute to my dad was happening here, he was going to his Senior prom in my dad's antique Thunderbird, which was an equally fitting tribute that would have delighted my dad.  So many times over the last decade, we think, dad would have loved to see this grandchild play rugby, that one graduate from Yale, this one in state-level special olympics, that one's art show, this one in uniform, that one winning a soccer game, this one's love for cars.  At the risk of overstepping my aunt privileges, I will end with Noah's photo by the car, because that would have made my dad so happy:

Joy and Thorns

My favorite Christmas hymn, or even just anytime hymn, has always been Joy to the World.  The united song of Heaven and Nature grasps the all things seen, and not seen, reign of the King which will extend to the frayed edges of the curse.  Verse three says:

No more let sin, and sorrows grow
Nor thorns infest the ground
He comes to make His blessings flow
Far as the curse if found . .

As the days stretch light until 8 pm (!!), and the frosty nights melt into temperate sunshine by noon, we are attacking a few curses around here.  Faulty plumbing, mildew, falling gutters.  And by we, I mean Scott, with me holding a ladder or handing an occasional tool.  Yesterday we ventured into our acres of woodland to finish reclaiming an old logging road, making a 4th path for hiking (my opinion) or ATV riding (everyone else's opinion).  We had noticed this contour in the hillside branching off from another path that Luke and his housemate Mike cleared a couple of months ago.  This one is steep, bumpy, narrow . . . and literally clogged with thorns.  Scott carried the chain saw and I carried the weed whacker.  While he attacked vegetation, I scouted a way to link this route to a larger path that my dad cleared long ago.  Which involves my favorite activity, trekking under soaring oaks, scratching through clusters of holly, startling a wood thrush, shuffling in leaves, tripping over wild grape vines, scouting a ridge.  By the time I settled on a good connection, Scott had hacked through a lot of brush on the old logging road.  And so the day went, cutting and clearing, hauling armloads of vines and branches off to make a path.

The sheer density of bramble is enough to make you believe in Genesis.  Any patch of sunlight engenders a dense thorny tangle.  When you pull them out of trees they snap your face, or poke through work gloves, drawing blood.  Such is the nature of the fight.

When the thorns were rooted in the path, I tried to pull them up.  If we just weed-whack them down, I know they'll be right back.  But the roots turned out to be larger than the vines themselves!  They are deep and dense, creepily sunless, tenacious.  Tiring to pull.


At some point in the afternoon I snapped a photo (see the long white root to the right), because I was humming Joy to the World in my head and I knew there was a good spiritual analogy here.  In my own life, I prefer the weed-whacker approach of sin management.  Clear out the poky prickly visible stuff that snags me, or hurts others.  Clean up the comments, the judgements, the reluctance to engage, the distance, the jealousy.  Make myself cheerier, more presentable, more what I think a 50-something mission leader should look like.

But those thorns just keep growing back, and it's a relentless cycle.  Unless the roots are pulled up, painfully, disruptively.  Roots of loving myself more than others, roots of disbelief that God is good and enough and good enough, roots of finding value in comparison or seeking comfort in success.





The sins, sorrows, and thorns; the broken places that we choose as well as those that we suffer as parts of this broken world, have a limit.  The way of the cross pulls up those roots for good, and slowly the Kingdom breaks in with flowers.  Or lichen.  The one above reminded me of a butterfly, the beauty-from-ashes symbol of transformation, something flying out of the rot.  That's us.  Good news.

Elisha's room

We have some amazing Shunammites in our lives.  If you recall, there was a "notable woman" who invited the prophet Elisha to eat in her home, and he liked it so much that as often as he passed by, he would turn in there to eat.  He showed up so often that she decided to build a guest room.  No basements in those days.  The room was enclosed on the wall of the roof, with a bed, a table, a chair, and a lampstand.  Elisha knew he had a place to stay in his itinerate lifestyle of preaching and healing.

We are not exactly Elishas, but the life of motion, of carrying a message, of being a little out of step with the culture, of neediness, of burden, we can relate to.  So this is a tribute to the people who take us in.  You know who you are.  Particularly those in the cities where we have had kids in college and medical school, where we keep showing up.  Sometimes I'm embarrassed to call AGAIN, and sometimes you preempt that (like the Shunammite woman) and insist.

On behalf of missionaries everywhere, let me thank the people with the basement bedrooms.  You who keep washing sheets and towels, making coffee and setting out cereal.  Who share your internet passwords and hand over keys, who sit and ask us questions and don't get tired of us coming back again and again. Who let us call at the last minute.  Who don't ask when we are leaving.  And in a case fast approaching, who are vacating the entire house for our family at graduation.

We have seen God's graciousness through the spare bedrooms of North Carolina, Virginia, Connecticut, Colorado . .  (repeatedly) . . and beyond (Illinois, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Georgia, California, Ohio, Tennessee, Arkansas. . .).

We can only pray that God blesses you as miraculously and generously as He did the Shunammite family, though that had is tension of drama, pain, loss, and faith too.  Intentionally entering into the fray with missionaries can be risky.

  

 And we can learn from your example.  The Fox and the Flamingo (i.e. our Sago farm) has had some visitors this year.  Inexplicably this past weekend we had seven people from four generations and three directions/connections of our life all decide to experience spring in Appalachia, though it was actually WINTER.  We were delighted to make beds, cook meals, direct hikes, play music, pray and talk.

 

 

Should you have a taste for mountains, rivers, trees and sky, or for quiet, and a day to spare, give us a call.  We are here intermittently through the next couple months, and we would love to share.




 

(These photos are from the weekend . . but this morning it is sunny and green about 50 degrees warmer!!)

The first 80 years . . .

In 1936, the world had not yet succumbed to fascism or fractured in the wake of aggressive invasions and persecution of minorities into an all-out war .  A delightful children's book set in Spain was published, which seemed to hope that we would opt for smelling the flowers rather than the blood and gore of violence:

And this became the favorite childhood book of a little girl named Judy born on April 5 of that year, in Ripley WV, the youngest of five siblings. By the time she was 4 her older two brothers enlisted to fight in WWII and her father died of a heart attack.  Her mother took over his job as postmaster of their small town and raised her younger children alone, with piano lessons and good literature and a love of family.

Her studies paid off in graduating first in her class, and going on to college at West Virginia Wesleyan in Buckhannon.  One day in her sophomore year she needed a gun for a skit about Davy Crockett, and her friend suggested borrowing from a local town boy named Tom. When he came to her dorm for her to return it, she accidentally dropped it down a marble stairway.  He picked up the pieces and boldly suggested that she go on a date with him in lieu of an apology.  Within six months they were engaged, and when her mother died leaving her a complete orphan at age 21 they went ahead and got married before her senior year of college.  Tom served in the army at Fort Knox while she lived in his parents' attic until she graduated.  

The rest, as they say, is history.  Raising two daughters in Herndon and Sterling, Virginia, starting a construction company business they ran out of their home, living generously, deeply involved in church and school and community and family.  Loving history, national parks, road trips, reunions, making apple butter, antiques, decorating, movies, slide-shows, card games, hymns.  Leading and serving many, but mostly us.  And here we are, 80 years later, celebrating.

Party #1 was a family affair, Easter at my sister Janie's.  She gathered my mom's one remaining brother, and 7 of 8 grandchildren, and we had a memorable beautiful dinner and party.  Notice her artistic cake, and all those young happy faces.

Party #2 was a  community affair, on her actual birthday.  Mary, who has essentially been a daughter to her, offered to host a tea for about 25 ladies from her decades in Virginia.  Scones and sandwiches, flowers, balloons, cake, conversation, a lively Judy-version of her favorite game-show Jeopardy, and a lot of emotion. 

 

These four raised their children together--and drove from Maine, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Virginia to reunite.  Sweet.

Kindred spirits--you can't see it, but they actually dressed almost exactly alike, unplanned!

It was quite the day, and I only hope that in another 30 years I have this many dear friends who would take the time to celebrate like this.  In ten days it will have been 10 years since my dad died.  I would not have dreamed at the time that my mom would be so well cared for, settled, content, finding new friends, active, energetic, healthy, and engaged as she turns 80.  The credit goes to God's grace, and to my sister who has kept close and stepped in with care when needed, and to my Mom who never gives up!

Well, those were the two big parties, and along the way we had lunches and surprises.  I'll end with a snap from Charlotte where Jack's Duke club Rugby played in the regional finals, and came in second.  Faithful cousins came out to see the carnage, and we all had BBQ together afterwards, which was the beginning of the celebratory weekend/week.   

We're grateful we were in the USA for this milestone--Jack and Noah also both hit 18 in 2016, and Emma and Caleb both hope to graduate from college (and Caleb turned 21).  It's quite the year.

Spring Restoration

We pull into the dusk of our West Virginia farm as two small deer startle, and then our headlights pick up an entire herd by the clothesline.  Nine more young ones, slender, tentative, blinking, hesitating then jumping the stream to amble up into the shadows of the hollow.  Three weeks ago we left winter, but now a balmy fertile breeze warms the outdoors above the chill emptiness of a long-closed house.  We open the windows to go to sleep, and catch the mysterious call of an owl up the hillside.  Morning reveals three golden glorious forsythia, exuberantly unruly, and perhaps a thousand daffodils.  The sparse clusters I planted last Fall are dwarfed by the sheer excess of an entire hillside of the flowers, and more patches along the stream and in the woods.  Who knew?  This is new territory for us, Springtime.  I hang the wash on the line as four hawks swoop low over the meadow then circle upwards on a draft.  Chickadees appreciate the re-filled bird feeder.  I had forgotten the heady life-ness of this season.

Lent already feels far behind us, the austerity and discipline stir a slight fondness and the snow a memory of its own lean beauty, but I am no-regrets delighted by the new leaves on the fruit trees we planted, by the budding tulips.  Even my Norwegian (3/4)-Swede (1/4) cold-loving partner is quickly ready to embrace Appalachian Spring.

Life, and that life more abundant, rushing, flowing, providing.  This is the season of Easter.  Decay reversed, death swallowed up to become the fodder for newness, for growth.

Sometimes religion in this country can feel smug, and this year evangelical embrace of some hateful politics accentuates that.  One could come through a season of Lent and Easter with a depressing burden of not measuring up, or with a defensive aggressiveness to win back the culture.  In the prayers and the papers we hear dire predictions of decay, a false memory of prosperity-next-to-godliness-good-old-days.  Bathroom signs distract from real problems like racism or lack of care for the alien or addictions or greed.

So please, this April, walk out into the mountains.  Listen for a rushing river.  Glory in the yellow of daffodils and forsythia.  The One who paints this beauty has grand plans for the universe.  Open your eyes to Life, and let your heart long for the restoration of all things (Acts 3:21).

Wrath and Redemption

Tonight the Passover begins, the traditional retelling of the deliverance of the descendants of Abraham from their slavery in Egypt which involved unleavened bread (a bread of affliction, cooked in haste), bitter herbs, recitations and readings, and four cups of wine.  This is a tradition we incorporated into our lives early in our marriage and have loved bringing its richness into the culture of our team communities, particularly last year when we had the entire East Africa field gathered on the coast at sunset to begin our retreat time together.

The cups have always fascinated me, the double-entendre of wine as blood and celebration, as sacrifice and joy, as wrath and redemption.  

In reflecting on the holiday this year, I am deeply thankful that this is not a time to gloss over evil.  This week, dozens of innocent travelers lost their lives standing in line at the airport or rushing to get a subway train in Brussels.  In Bujumbura, grenades and an assassination.  In Kampala, we have followed soberly as our friends from Mundri searched for their missing son, now paying for exhumation of remains in two different mass graves where the unclaimed indigent dead are piled, a fruitless exercise of horror and confusion.  We still don't know what happened to Joseph, but his parents are increasingly convinced he was killed.  From near Bundibugyo, one of the doctors we were able to get sponsorship for training is now back working and writes asking for prayer as tribal-based-fear continues to spark violent murders, he speaks of 17 in the last week (only half the toll of Brussels, but one-thousandth or less of the coverage).  In America, people who should know better foment fear and hate and use phrases like carpet-bomb and water-board to stir up the same emotions that churn South Sudan into a disintegrating war of my-kind-takes-all and your-kind-loses. And all this is just the public and visible evil; the bulky weight of deceit and darkness and abuse and despair remains murkily obscure.

Evil, in short, abounds.  

Which is why we need a holiday, and a God, that weeps. A cup of wrath, because it is NOT ok to distract ourselves from a 22-year-old being murdered, by imagining vapid bunnies.  No, our God takes evil seriously, so seriously that judgement was a bitter cup poured out in flies and boils and darkness and death.  But we also need a God whose wrath is so founded in love that He drinks the cup himself. A cup of wrath becomes a cup of redemption tonight, this weekend, on the cross, in the grave, at the resurrection.  

Jesus began his ministry pouring wine out of pots that held water; he ends pouring blood out of his own wounded side.  The abundance of the first miracle can hardly shadow the abundance of the last, enough to fill all this broken world with redemption.  

Terror and Awe

The Pacific ocean thunders with power.  I watch with awe.  Once, a few years ago, I was swimming with our family and even though we were on a beach that was supposed to be safe, I got caught in a frightening undertow.  I struggled and struggled and could not get any closer to shore.  Finally Scott saw me and swam out, and with his strength together we were able to move down the shore and find a place we could come in.  Since then I treat the ocean with respect for it's sheer immensity, energy, force.  Danger.  

This morning we awoke to news of another terrorist attack.  Evil, raw and destructive, lashing out to cause terror.  Bombs and blood and severed limbs and disrupted lives, in Brussels.  

An hour later I was running by the ocean, thinking, praying.  And as I watched the waves, the song which echoed was "waves of mercy, waves of grace, everywhere I look, I see His face . . ".  The tumult of the waves in Biblical poetry is sometimes a metaphor for the chaos of evil but is also used for the mystery of God (Psalm 42:7 and 88:7), God's presence a disruptive power breaking over our life.  

Like Lewis's famous Aslan line, good but not safe, the ocean provides a metaphor of mercy.  Deep, surging, uncontrolled, hiding beauty and sustenance and energy and magnificence, glorious, covering the earth.  It is only when that mercy breaks upon the hard rocky shore of our lives that the waves foam and seem to destroy.  Can we believe, on a day like today, that the crashing wave the splinters upon our rocks is actually a sign of love?  Can we stand in the spray and sense awe, without falling to abject terror?

Today we listen to the news videos looping over and over, smoke and a wailing child.  Evil afoot.  Over two millennia ago, this week also marked the attempt of evil men to slay the innocent.  Jesus faced the same mentality, the fear-inducing men who sought power by crushing the One that threatened their dominance.  He did not give in to terror, but walked with agonizing faith the way of the cross, committing His spirit into the hands of a Love that worked redemption in the very moments of death.

Can we throw ourselves upon the wavs of Mercy, the mystery of God's redeeming work in this world, even when it feels like we are being drowned with sorrow?  Can we look with faith, with awe, and reject terror?

The sting of death has been removed.  We don't control the surging power of God, but we know that the end of the story is goodness, is love, is redemption that no terrorist can overcome.