This weekend Diane and I will do the “meet-you-halfway-between-here-and-Missouri” switch with my parents. They’ve had Christopher (age 11) and his close cousin Maddie (10) for the week.
What a great thing it’s been for our children growing up to have the nurturing of grandparents. I like the old quip that grandparents and grandchildren are so close because they share a common enemy.
I’ve been obsessed lately (partly because of an incident at Highland that I told about in the Christian Chronicle) with the question, How can the church be a place where grandmothering and grandfathering takes place–especially for all the kids who either don’t have grandparents or rarely get to see them?
Already I’ve received this raving response to my blog: “I love this. I’ll enjoy reading it regularly.” Thanks for the note, Mom.
Last night in “Peak of the Week,” Randy Halstead spoke about “sacred places.” That resonated with me, especially since I’d written about one sacred place in Monday’s journal. But I got to thinking about other sacred places in my life: Green Valley Bible Camp (where I went every year as a kid), Glen Eyrie (a retreat center in Colorado Springs), Serra Retreat Center in Malibu (where I like to go pray and walk the stations of the cross), Megan’s grave, Highland’s sanctuary, and the dining room at Darryl and Anne Tippens’s old house. Now our covenant group rotates homes, but for a few years, we always met there since their kids were raised. It was/is a place of joy, of prayer, of hope, of grief, and of connecting.
Now I’m wondering . . . What sacred places do you have in your life?
A friend of mine who interned with me at Highland several years ago and is now in Tulsa is the one who’s encouraged me to start this blog. Go check out Wade’s site.
I’m ready to launch my new series on the gospel of John (beginning with the new ACU school year). But at this eleventh hour, I’m still not sure of the theme. I’d been planning to call it “Radical Claims, Radical Courage.” John apparently wrote to a group of Christians who had recently been separated from the synagogue. For many of them, that meant loss of family, loss of heritage–even loss of income. (See hints of this in 7:13; 9:22; 12:42; and 16:2.) In response, he makes radical claims about Jesus–arguably the “highest” Christology in the New Testament (perhaps along with Hebrews).
But now I’m intrigued with a passage in John 12. God speaks from heaven about Jesus’ glory. Some said it was just thunder; others knew it was more than thunder. So, I’m playing with the theme “More Than Thunder.” As soon as Wade or someone else tells me how to get comments at this site, I’ll ask for your feedback!
Dr. Paul Brand died last month in Seattle. As I reflect on the life of this amazing man — a surgeon/missionary who cared for leprosy patients in India, tenderly restoring bodies and hearts — I remember the joy of reading IN HIS IMAGE, FEARFULLY AND WONDERFULLY MADE, and THE FOREVER FEAST. In FEARFULLY he wrote, “I have sometimes wondered why leprosy merits its own mission; I know of no ‘Malaria Mission’ or ‘Cholera Mission.’ I think the reason is the starving need of leprosy patients for human touch. It is a unique and terrible need, and Christian love and sensitivity meet it best.”
In SOUL SURVIVOR, Philip Yancey named Dr. Brand as one of his heroes and guides in faith. Reflecting on their work together (Yancey coauthored IMAGE and FEARFULLY with Brand), he wrote: “We made an odd couple, Dr. Brand and I. I was a young punk in my mid-twenties with a bushy Art Garfunkel-style hair; Brand was a dignified, silver-haired surgeon characterized by proper British reserve. In my role as a journalist I had interviewed many subjects: actors and musicians, politicians, successful business executives, Olympic and professional athletes, Nobel laureates and Pulitzer Prize winners. Something attracted me to Brand at a deeper level than I had felt with any other interview subject. For perhaps the first time, I encountered genuine humility.”
We just returned from Pensacola Beach–our 15th straight year in the same condo (since 1989). It is now like holy ground. We can look out at the sand on the gulf on one side and the sand on the Santa Rosa Sound on the other side and picture our children. We remember taking a little boy and his younger sister. We remember taking the brand new baby in 1992. We can still see Megan there during her very ill days. We recall clearly the first summer of grief following her death. And now this year, we got to return with our boys and a girl (who next year will be our daughter-in-law).
It has been a sanctuary, an oasis, a respite, an emergency care center through this decade and a half. We have swam, played tennis, bought fresh fish at Joe Patti’s, eaten the best grouper sandwich in the world from Peg Leg Pete’s, jumped in the waves, collected shells, biked, thrown baseballs, played Uno and Hearts, read, listened to Jimmy Buffett and Michael W. Smith (not together usually), watched movies, prayed, and grown deeply in our love.