Category Archives: Answered Prayer
Dorothy’s Instantaneous Healing
Long ago in my thirties, I was in a Catholic Charismatic (Pentecostal) prayer group that was led by several Sisters of Mercy at their convent.
I, along with Pat, another woman member, were registered to attend the annual Charismatic Renewal Conference at Notre Dame University. At the prayer meeting two days before the conference, a young woman in her early twenties asked if she could go with us. We had spoken about a priest that led a small group of sisters and nurses in a healing ministry, and Dorothy had curvature of the spine with one leg shorter than the other. This caused her to have to wear an ugly built up shoe, it also sometimes caused her pain, and she feared that when she married and became pregnant it would cause more problems. It was too late to register her and probably too late to get her a room in the dorms, but we told her to bring a sleeping bag and stay in our room. So, Dorothy set off with us. We were running a little late and I was worried that we would miss the first large session in the gymnasium, which was the presentation on healing. A couple of weird time changes later we arrived just as it was beginning, but had to sit almost at the very top of the gymnasium. We were supposed to wait until it cleared at the end to find Pat’s sister, who was coming from Pittsburg. As the gym emptied, I prayed nervously about whether to take Dorothy down to the group with the healing ministry. I finally said, “God, if you want them to pray for Dorothy, please bring them up our aisle, and I’ll ask them to pray for her.” The gym was almost empty, but we had not spotted Pat’s sister, so we were still sitting almost at the top on an aisle. Just then, the priest and the others with the healing ministry started up our exact aisle on their way out. As they came near us, I spoke hesitantly, “Father, would you pray for Dorothy here. She has one leg shorter than the other.” He stopped his group and said, “Of course. Let Dorothy sit in your chair here on the aisle.” So, Dorothy moved into my seat and the several prayer members and Pat and I put our hands on her shoulders and held her hands, while the priest led us in a gentle quiet prayer asking God for healing in Jesus name. No frills, no dramatics. Then he stopped abruptly and asked Dorothy, “Did you feel that? I think your leg jumped.” Dorothy with tears flowing, agreed that it had. He then led us in prayers of thanksgiving, smiled, and continued on up the stairs.
As we sat stunned into silence, Pat’s sister appeared next to us. Following her out of the gym, we excitedly recounted our experience with a mixture of laughter and tears of joy. Dorothy suddenly stopped and said in amazement, “I’m limping. My built up shoe is making me lopsided.” So, she took off her shoes and continued on, literally ‘leaping and dancing and praising God.’
After we got to our dorm room, my inner Twin to Thomas kicked in. It ‘just so happened’ that Pat was a physical therapist. For the next hour, I kept making Pat measure Dorothy’s legs over and over. Pat kept reassuring me that they truly matched. No doubt about it. But there was still some visible curvature of her spine. When, in the wee hours of the morning, we began to tire, Pat went to the communal dorm bathroom to brush her teeth. There she met an older woman and told her of our experience, ending with the curious fact that Dorothy’s spine was still curved. The woman reassured her by telling her that her own husband’s leg, which had been a whole inch shorter than his other one, had been healed the year before at this conference. She said that the leg grew immediately, but it took six months for the atrophied muscles to develop fully back to normal.
We finally all went to sleep exhausted, wonderous, thankful, and at peace.
Funnily, since Dorothy now had no shoes to wear, two days of June’s hot sidewalks left her with some blisters on the bottoms of her feet. Maybe we should have prayed some preventative prayers also 🙂
Over the next several months I, of little faith, looked each time our prayer group met to assure myself that Dorothy was indeed happily wearing sandals, flip flops, or tennis shoes.
And almost ten years later, now married and the mother of two children, Dorothy came to our parish to tell her story to our women’s group.
Yes, she was still happily and painlessly wearing sandals.
Gifts of Age (Part Seven): Aging Like Fine Wine by Dancing in Our Hearts
Dance of Youth
New bottles seldom hold particularly fine wine. Likewise, the gifts of age don’t come in teenaged bodies. On the outside I’m a short, plump, white-haired old lady on a walker. But inside me still live all my younger selves. And the imp inside has gotten braver with the passage of time, so I challenge other little old ladies on walkers to races and to consider themselves armed and dangerous. I plan to get tee shirts that say, “Bare Toes Beware” and “I Can Do Anything You Can Do, Just a Whole Lot Slower.”
Being in my mid-seventies, not only means that I’ve run out of a future full of possibilities, it also means that I’ve actually seen the consequences of some of my major screw-ups in my younger years. And part of my spiritual journey has involved developing enough self-awareness to recognize a self-serving element even in the good things that I do. Parting with delusions is a painful process, but like most difficult things in life, it has an up-side. It eventually makes it easier to live lightly, unburdened by carrying pockets full of stones to throw at others. All those cracks in my façade make that quite hazardous.
Letting go of physical agility and mental acuity as major parts of our self-image is one of the most frightening challenges of this part of the spiritual journey. When I was young and lithe, one of my few natural talents was ballet. In fact, I often expressed my emotions through dance. Once, I danced in sheer joy at the awesomeness of God, while reading The Well Springs of Life by Isaac Asimov. He used several diverse sciences, that study both the macrocosms and the microcosms of the universe, to trace the incredibly orderly and unifying processes of evolution in all aspects of creation. Even such a small glimpse of the brilliance and glory of God was almost blinding. Verbal praise was simply not enough. This cried for praise with my whole self. I put the book down and danced to express my overflowing  joy.
I can no longer physically dance, nor do I have enough mental energy or short term memory to explore complex scientific descriptions of the glory of God in His creation. But age brings simple moments of grace that lift my heart and mind to dance on butterfly wings.
A grandchild whose journey through autism began with learning a few simple signs to ask for basic needs, now keeps me awake chatting past our bedtime. As I pray for energy to stay awake, I dance with delight in my heart at having this once unimaginable experience.
In another part of my series, Gifts of Age, I describe the timely sight of a cow-pile covered in golden Monarch Butterflies just as I was telling God that I was up to my neck in manure down here and asking where the heck He was in all this. Â What a perfect symbol of grace. Â Butterflies, the classic symbol of transformation, happen to need certain chemicals found in manure. Â Problems that go beyond our human ability to solve can open us to God and the grace to grow.
And, believe me, old age is full of that kind of fertilizer.
Dwindling energies and a sense of time passing at warp speed force me to re-evaluate my priorities. Where do I want to focus my limited resources? On image? On possessions? On my aches and limits? On pleasure as a temporary distraction? On a past that I cannot change? On a future that may never come?  It seems more important now, to focus on recognizing the footprints of God in my daily life, on celebrating God’s presence in the small and ordinary, even in the heartbreak, and to share that awareness however I can.
No matter what our age is; today is the only day we actually have.  We can seize it, rejoice in it, and  dance in our hearts.
Healing: Mind, Body, and Soul
I don’t think any of us are intentionally evil, but we are all blind. When Jesus prayed from the cross, “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do,” he meant all of us. When Paul said, “We see through the glass darkly,” he meant all of us, including himself.
Without grace there is no way we can get beyond our limited perceptions. We are molded and even warped by our historical era, culture, climate, nationality, race, class, religion, education, genes, ancestors, parents, peers, personalities, bodies, health, and life experiences. We are all crippled and incomplete spiritually, emotionally, mentally, and physically.
Only by dying to these limits, to our earthbound selves, can we become free to see, and then to love, as Jesus did. Since many of these influences are rooted in our unconscious, it takes times facing our demons in the desert to even begin to know ourselves and times spent in prayer on the mountain with God to be set free mentally and reborn spiritually and healed physically. There is a huge difference between praying, “God, if it is your will, heal me.” And saying, “God, heal me according to your will.” God wants us healed. Though mental, spiritual, and physical healing are connected, I have been with both the young and the old when they were at peace dying physically, because they had been healed spiritually and I have seen people healed spiritually by being healed physically. With God all things are possible. He is the same, but we are all different. There are no limiting rules, just the goal of bringing each of us home to live immersed in His Love forever.
The scriptures show Jesus approaching healing differently for different people. “Do you want to be healed?” “Your sins are forgiven.” “Stand up and walk.” “Go show yourself to the religious authorities.” “Your faith has healed you.” “Some things take prayer and fasting.” The question isn’t whether God wants us healed. The question is where does the process need to begin.
Passion, death, and resurrection should be one word. Jesus struggling with his fears in the garden, feeling totally abandoned by his family and friends, his anguish so great that he sweat drops of blood, and finally being able to say, “Your will, not mine,” is what set Him free to rise again.
We are born again by recognizing and admitting we need to be set free, by putting ourselves in God’s hands, and then continuing to allow His Spirit to burn the chaff within us in life-long on going passiondeathandresurrections.
These things seem to me to be true: (I’ll get back to you later, when God tells me different.) 1.We all fall short: rich and poor, male and female, educated and uneducated, presidents and drug addicts, young and old, religious and non-religious, Republicans and Democrats. 2.Becoming is more important than achieving. 3. We can’t change anyone else. And the best way to help others isn’t by pretending to be a super person, but by sharing our struggle and our need for grace to become our best selves. (And that even our best selves may not be something to brag about!) 4. It takes a ton of grace and varying amounts of blood, sweat, and tears for each of us to grow closer to being the person we were created to be. (Some of us tend to make it harder for ourselves.)
The Love of God
The Love of God is the only thing
of any importance at all.
The Love of God is so incredibly different
and beyond compare
that it boggles our ability to believe in it
enough to accept it.
No matter how much we have been loved
by family and friends,
no matter how famous and wildly adored
by the multitudes,
nothing has ever been more than
a barely glimpsed shadow
of the Love of God.
The Love of God is all that is necessary.
We need nothing more
than to know the unconditional love of God
with our whole mind,
to experience it with an open heart
until our spirit is so filled
with it, that we simply pass it on
by letting it overflow.
We begin to sense this Love of God
when we consider
the possibility that the creator of the universe
chose to walk in our skin,
to experience the frustrating and fearful limits
of being human,
being born under crushing political oppression,
a scorned minority,
bearing physical exhaustion and bodily pain,
the heartbreak
of being abandoned and even betrayed
by his only friends,
publicly ridiculed, tortured and killed,
even taking the
leap of faith into the darkness of death
to show us there is more,
because of His Love.
The love of God can free us to see ourselves
exactly as we are,
to accept our own need for forgiveness
without guilt, just true sorrow
that brings a joy that sets us free from fear
and gives us grace to change.
The Love of God begins to free us to forgive
both ourselves and others.
The Love of God heals us of the crippling wounds
that stunt our growth in love.
The Love of God takes our mustard seed of good
and nurtures it with grace.
The Love of God builds our faith and sets us free
to die and live again.
The Love of God is
personal, unconditional, and eternal.
All else fails.
There is nothing greater than
the Love of God expressed in Jesus,
the Love of God for you.
My Introduction to Violence and the Miracle of Martin Luther King
About 1954 when I was seventeen, someone set a bomb off in our entrance hall. It was the night of an election with a black woman running for the school board in Houston, Texas. Segregation and the myth of separate, but equal schools were still firmly in place, and the black schools had never had representation on the board. I believe she was the first black candidate.
My father was a newspaper editor and had written editorials supporting her.
The bomb was not like bombs today. It didn’t destroy walls or knock down the door, but it had enough impact to cause the confetti packing and sharp pieces of slate to become embedded in the door and walls. It was set off about three in the morning, my father was still at the newspaper covering the election, and I was half-way down the stairs before I decided not to go to the door. That was my first personal experience of the human capacity for senseless violence.
Though my mother was from Mississippi and my father was from Louisiana, they had taught me that prejudging people on the basis of their skin color was not only wrong, it was ignorant. And ignorance was THE mortal sin in our family.
When I married and moved to Nashville, Tennessee our friends were mostly doctors and lawyers and college professors. In the middle sixties I decided to join the NAACP after one of my friends, who was a volunteer at a local hospital, informed us all angrily that, “There was no way in hell, she was going to carry that n_____ baby out to their car. And she told them that right then and there. She didn’t care who heard her.” Obviously, a college education isn’t always a cure for ignorance.
So in 1968 I was working at the NAACP office when the Poor People’s March came through Nashville. There were many young blacks from out of town, who belonged to more militant organizations like SNCC and CORE, going in and out of the office where I was answering the phone. Their obvious strong hatred of whites, even those of us working for the NAACP, was frightening.
It seemed to me that America was headed for a bloody race war where many innocent people on both sides would be destroyed. I began to pray fervently for a miracle that would prevent that.
I have come to see Martin Luther King as that miracle. I believe whites should be as grateful to him as blacks.
I thank God for Martin Luther King.
Mother Teresa’s Dark Night of the Soul
The Book, Mother Teresa * Come Be My Light is a collection of her letters and her journals, which she had wanted burned when she died. Through them we see her terrible interior struggle with despair and feelings of abandonment by God.
She had mystical experiences and years of a sense of God’s presence when she was struggling to get permission and the means for the ministry she knew God was asking of her. But once she actually begins working with the poorest of the poor, she loses those, and not only feels abandoned, but sometimes even doubts the reality of God.
In her uphill battle to get permission from Church Authorities all the way up to the Pope, she harasses them incredibly, all the while saying, “I accept your authority and your decision. But could you hurry, because this is God’s call and people are being lost.”  I love that.
She says that she has no ego left, just her desire to love God more than anyone ever has. Hmm. I’m not sure that’s not a form of ego, but it beats heck out of most forms.She is honest with her Spiritual Directors about her spiritual darkness, but fakes it with her community for fear she will damage their faith.
At eighty years of age, she never slows down in her exhausting physical ministry and even after winning the Nobel Peace Prize, she still humbly does dishes and cleans along with the other sisters in her community.
All the time she is without faith, joy, or even meaningful prayer, she is having tremendous success in her ministry and accolades from the world. But she is only able to go through the motions, heart-broken, doing her duty by fulfilling her promises to a God that seems to be gone.
That seems to me to be more awesome, than her mystical experiences or winning the Nobel Prize.
And it confirms what my minister answered one day when I asked him, “What’s it all about?”
He replied quickly with great assurance, “Perseverance.”
Hubris Three : Unless You Come as a Child
I have two previous posts titled Hubris One and Hubris Two. This one, Hubris Three, will make more sense, if the others are read first.
In Hubris One and Two I describe my spiritual journey during my twenties: of rejecting my childhood faith, a period of settling for pleasure in hedonism, an unsuccessful search for  God in Religious Institutions, a search for purpose and meaning through working for civil rights, and then seeking a way to change hearts and minds, not just laws, by getting a degree in psychology, then recognizing that psychology also had serious limits, since most people don’t admit they need to change.
About this time, one of the couples in our social group began to talk and act strangely. Judy and Earl began to drink less, dance with each other, and finally to our horror, would mention Jesus Christ, as if he were someone they knew, not just an exclamation. Since they were our friends, most of us overlooked these aberrations and tried to not be too obvious, when we edged away from their inappropriate cocktail party conversations.
Soon however, they got our full attention, when they announced that Earl was giving up his job in his family’s company. And they were selling their home and expensive toys to work full time for a nondenominational, nonprofit organization called Campus Crusade for Christ.
We had to admit that was “putting your money where your mouth is!”
Most of us decided that it was temporary insanity. They’d get over it and we hoped they had set up trust funds for their children.
And I shrugged aside my feelings of envy of their believing in something enough to stake their whole life on it.
Judy’s sister was my best friend. She was much less assertive than Earl and Judy, but she finally shared with me that she had a new faith, a personal relationship with Christ, not just a church or religion. She couldn’t articulate it very well, but at this same time, her husband abandoned her and their two young daughters. Her strength through this devastating experience made it obvious, that whatever it was that she had discovered, it made a difference even in heartbreak.
In the middle of Hilde’s beginning over, Judy and a team of women from Campus Crusade came to town. Judy asked Hilde to host a Christian Coffee for her friends. I rallied our friends to help Hilde. I invited people saying, “I don’t know what a Christian Coffee is. I didn’t know our usual ones weren’t! But the talks will be short and the food will be fantastic. Come for Hilde’s sake.”
At the coffee, several women gave talks describing how they now had a “personal relationship” with Jesus Christ, since they had accepted Him as their Savior and Lord. I didn’t really understand what these words meant and I wasn’t very comfortable with the simplistic religious language. My ears perked up, however, when they mentioned freeing insights into their own behavior patterns, improved relationships with their families, and a greater concern for others outside their limited social and racial group.
Obviously, whatever this experience was, it made concrete differences in the quality of their lives. And it was free, no college tuition or counseling fees.
When they led us in saying a prayer asking Jesus to be our Savior and Lord and to make us into the people He wanted us to be, I balked, blocked by my usual need to understand things intellectually first.
As others were weeping and hugging one another, I started gathering up dishes. But one of the women cornered me, asking if I had said the prayer. I said, “No, I can’t. I don’t believe in God and I think Jesus was a wonderful person, but an unrealistic visionary that got himself crucified.”
This woman was not deterred. She responded immediately, “Well, why don’t you just say the prayer this way, Jesus, if there is a God, and you are who you claim to be, please be my Savior and Lord.”
That threw me for a loop. It seemed like a win-win proposition. If none of it was true, I had nothing to lose. And if it was true, I certainly didn’t want to miss out on it. So, I prayed the prayer with her and accepted her hugs and congratulations, and went back to my Martha activities.
As I washed Hilde’s lovely china by hand, I listened to everyone celebrating around me and wondered if the prayer would ever make any difference to me.
Suddenly, feelings of sheer joy overwhelmed me. Somehow, I knew in that moment with my whole mind, heart, and spirit, that God was real and that He loved me unconditionally, even when I was denying Him. Teachings from my Catholic childhood, readings in the Bible, ideas from the Protestant classes, and insights from my study of Psychology all came together like pieces of a puzzle finally forming a whole picture.
But the most important part was the total confidence I now had, that I was completely known and deeply loved, faults and all, no brownie points necessary to earn it. Â As I drove home, bursting with joy, I tried to think of an appropriate song or hymn to sing. Â Although lovely, the Latin hymns of my childhood didn’t really fit the moment. Finally the child’s song, Jesus Loves Me, began to bubble up and out of me. Â Tears and joy overflowed as I sang at the top of my voice. Â And I realized that these simple words expressed perfectly what I knew now, that I did not know before.
In the next two years our group of women from most of the major denominations and one member from the Jewish faith came together each week to read the Scriptures and share our experiences of God in our daily lives. Many had always been active in their churches, but had never experienced this kind of relationship with Christ and God. For some the new understanding and deeper realization of the love of God came quietly, but steadily. For others, like me, it came almost like an explosion. But, in all of us, the Spirit began to bring new self-honesty, openness, and greater concern for others. The more we grew in our awareness of God in our lives, the freer we became to forgive ourselves and others and to love in new ways.
Although some things changed quickly, others did not. And we began to see more clearly that growth really is a life-long process, that needs nourishment from many sources: prayer, Scripture, the wisdom of others who have walked before us, and even humanity’s growing knowledge of Psychology and Biology. And perhaps most important, the acceptance and support of each other in our journey together.
Part of my new awareness was how ridiculous it was that I had thought that because my limited human mind could not make sense of God, then of course, God couldn’t exist. What HUBRIS!!
Humbled, but filled with the love of God, I began to see God everywhere, to experience miracles large and small. It’s like putting on God glasses. Reading the Scriptures was like reading letters from God.  Meaning simply poured off the pages.
And I wanted to share this new life with those I loved and with anyone God brought into my life.
Our group helped give another Christian Coffee and grew too large , so we divided into smaller sharing groups. We witnessed miracles where God seemed to intervene concretely in our lives. But then, we also learned to trust His love, when we humbly shared the pain and faith of one of our members dying with cancer.
Since our focus was on hearing God in the circumstances of our daily lives, we were able to hear through our different religious languages to our basic unity in the Spirit of God.
Each of us became more active in our own denominations and became involved in renewal movements within them.
Personally, in the forty-five years since that first “Christian Coffee,” I have found that simply belonging to a main stream denomination does not provide enough spiritual nurture without having a support group of those, who have also experienced a changed life through a personal relationship with Christ as Savior and Lord.
I have also found that ecumenical sharing groups have the best chance of avoiding making idols of denominations and empty religious observances. They seem to stay focused on growing in their personal relationships with Jesus as Lord better.
And I have learned that for diverse people saying the prayer accepting Jesus as Savior and Lord can play out very differently. We come into the circle of God’s love in different places with our unique histories and patterns and personalities. Don’t ever try to put God into a box, however wonderful it seems to you. God is bigger than any of our experiences, rituals, beliefs.
God meets us where we are and respects who we are, because He made us and knows us better than we do, never-the-less anyone else can.
The Spirit
Unexpected geyser
exploding joyously
a baptismal spectacular
opens our eyes.
“Come and See”
Tears of waterfalls
stirring lonely pools,
the reconciling Spirit
invites us gently.
“Follow Me.”
Hidden river flowing
with silent, ageless strength
transforms and renews
our hearts of stone.
“Drink of me.”
The Church of Devout Cowardice
Early in life I became a charter member of the Church of Devout Cowardice. Â Physical pain and I were not friends. Â As a child, I had no desire to climb trees, jump from roofs, or do anything else that had the slightest potential for injury.
This devotion was reinforced in my late twenties when some friends urged me to join them on a ski trip. Though one friend teased me unmercifully about being such a wus,  I was completely shameless about my compulsion for pain avoidance. The fact that this friend broke her leg getting off the ski lift on her first trip up the mountain definitely confirmed for me that  “Avoid all risks” should be the first commandment of all true believers of the Church of Devout Cowardice.
Ironically, being so inclined to imagine worst case scenarios all my life led to a stress related illness that not only caused me a lot of pain, but also put me into a wheelchair  in my late fifties and early sixties.  During this challenging time of life,  a son’s job with an airline gave us the marvelous blessing of thirteen years of free air travel to Europe.
Tourist sites in Europe are not known for their accessibility. Â Though I could walk short distances, hills and stairs were often too much for me. Â My son suggested a catapult for accessing castles and fortresses, but wus that I was, I demurred.
However, while we were on an innocuous Sound of Music day trip in Austria, the bus stopped to allow the foolhardy to ride down the side of a mountain on a sled with wheels in a  very long shallow metal  luge.  My twenty-something son, obviously having inherited none of my antipathy to pain genes, decided to try it.  I sat in my wheel chair on the loading dock as he began to get onto a sled built for two.  Out of the blue, a wild thought occurred to me.
“I’m already in pain and in a wheelchair, what have I got to lose?”
Before my wus self could talk me out of it, I stood up and said, “Wait, I’m going with you.” Â My son and my husband were too stunned to respond, so I climbed on as the worker began to start the sled down the luge. Â I was in the front where there was a hand brake. Â As we began to hurtle down the mountain, my instinct for survival kicked in, and I tugged desperately on the brake. Â To my relief, we began to slow.
At that point, a nine or ten year old boy luging behind us began to tail gate  and my son took charge of the brake.   I scrunched my eyes shut as we suddenly seemed airborne.  As much as I wanted to scream in terror, I couldn’t risk it, since either my heart or my lunch was in my throat.
I offered God my first born son, (not the one with airline privileges), if He would save me from certain excruciating pain.  When we came around the last curve and began leveling out and slowing down, I peeked out with one eye.  There was my husband waiting at the bottom  looking as terror stricken as I felt.  When he helped me out and into my wheelchair, he asked anxiously, “Are you all right? How was it?”
“Piece of cake,” I replied through gritted teeth. Â I never told him I meant my dessert from lunch.
God Does Sweat the Small Stuff
One of my nature enthusiasms after we moved to the country was to collect rocks, lichen, weeds, nuts, and pods to use in making ecology crafts with my children.
My first year of teaching primary grades I decided to use all these free materials for my class to make Christmas presents for their parents. My own children had used these for their teacher presents with happy results. Of course, four of them were already teens and my first grader took after his Architect father in both creativity and natural ability in constructing things.
So, after a migraine producing afternoon with twenty-five children indiscriminately piling heaps of pods, weeds, nuts, and the like onto flat rocks and then simply pouring whole bottles of white glue over them, I placed these horrible looking gooey white messes on the window sills to hopefully at least dry over the weekend.
Monday the parents were coming for our Christmas pageant and party and taking their children and their presents home for the holidays afterward. There would be no chance to start a new Christmas present project.
Disheartened, to say the least, I belatedly resorted to prayer, “God, we need a miracle here. The children had a great time, but even the kindest parent isn’t going to be able to disguise their reactions to these presents. Help please.”
Though exhausted, I slept only fitfully all weekend, dreading facing the debacle on the window sills on Monday.
But, it seems that God does sweat the small stuff after all.
The sunshine through the windows and the heat in the room, had somehow not only dried the glue to transparent, but in ways I will never understand, allowed the excess decorations to fall off each gooey clump. The remaining creations were each unique, and all quite lovely.
The Holy Spirit works not only is mysterious ways, but in very artistic ones.
One mother of six other older children, took me aside and said, “This is awesome. It’s the first thing any of my children has ever made, that I actually look forward to keeping in my living room.”
After the happy children and parents had departed, I swept up the scattered liberated pods and weeds, and thanked God profusely for sweating the small stuff.
