Laughter: Carbonated Grace

at 18

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at 36 with my family

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I finally figured out that all the people I ever was from infancy on still live inside me. It makes for an interesting group most days. And if I don’t like how I feel today, I just return and watch the world when I was having a better time. Young people actually seem impoverished, because they haven’t got a clue about the riches we old guys carry around within us. I wouldn’t trade, because we can go back and be their age inside our memories, but they can’t come forward and enjoy the pleasures of a party without having to drive miles, spend hundreds or pay later with a hangover.
We do know more dead people and we have seen more tragedies up close and personal, so sometimes we hover protectively over our grandchildren. But we can look back…

NASA Cloudy Earth, Flickr Creative Commons

What was spoken through the prophet is fulfilled:
Look! A virgin will become pregnant
and give birth to a son,
and they will call him, Emmanuel.
(Emmanuel means “God with us.”)

 In bomb-shattered cities
children unable to play freely in the streets

In poverty-wracked slums
families struggling to put food on the table

In violence-plagued neighborhoods
the young learning early that life is cheap

On tear-soaked refugee trails
people desperately looking for a way to freedom

On vulnerable island shores
communities fighting the futile battle against rising sea levels

In the midst of everyday pain,
in the grip of widespread suffering,
the promised one comes and takes up residence among us.

Emmanuel – God with us in our deepest need.

There is no one left out of this divine scheme,
no one whose accident of birth disqualifies them,
no one whose skin color…

Jesus loves you, but I’m His favorite. NOT!

I do have stories about making good choices. And I will tell some of them as I blog along. But, it seems more important to share about God staying involved in our lives when we are screwing up; to remind myself and others that God loves us, not because of who we are, but because of who God is.

My mother always made Christmas extraordinary, even when money was in short supply. She polished and decorated every square inch of our apartment. The presents may not have cost a lot, but they were wrapped beautifully. There was a constant flow of guests, often widows without family near-by or young families without parents and grandparents around. There were special treats to eat, but also even the plain old potted meat sandwiches were trimmed and cut into triangles with parsley sprigs around them on…

I’ve never gotten a message from God in a bottle, but I’ve gotten them a lot of other ways. God is amazingly creative in getting His point across.

When our five children were still young, my father-in-law gave us a side of beef every Christmas. One Christmas some friends with seven children were starting a new business and money was in very short supply. So, my husband and I decided to share some of our beef with them.

Now, I had by this time read the Scriptures quite a lot, so I was very familiar with the many times and ways Jesus told us to love others as ourselves,  to share what we have, and even His comparison of the poor woman who gave all she had and the rich man who did not.

But as I loaded a basket with hamburger, pot roasts, and even some round steaks, every…

A long time ago, when I was in my mid-twenties, I became disillusioned with religious institutions. Since I had been brought up in one that declared itself the infallible mouthpiece of God, I was also disillusioned with what had passed for God up to that point in my life.

My father’s premature death and the inequalities and suffering I saw in the world convinced me that if there was a God, I didn’t like him very much. Not liking God was uncomfortable, to say the least, since the feeling might well be mutual. It was easier to just not believe in one.

I simply abandoned God to a mental file labeled “Probably Not,” and proceeded to enjoy a reasonably affluent lifestyle of many delightful pleasures.  The problem with a life of pleasure is that it is addictive.  It took more and newer pleasures to keep my naturally questioning mind turned…

My father was a crusading newspaper editor in Houston, Texas. In the fifties, before the civil rights movement had begun to gain momentum, he publicly supported the first black to run for a position on the school board. This wasn’t about integration. It was just a matter of giving blacks some representation for their own schools. Late on the night of the election, someone set off a small, but potentially fatal bomb in the entrance hall to our apartment after ringing our doorbell. Though at that late hour I had enough sense to stop short of opening the door, I was close enough to recognize the danger and to feel the hatred it represented.
After marriage, I moved to Nashville, Tennessee, where I was part of a relatively affluent social group. One of my Candy Striper, hospital volunteer friends came to a party full of righteous indignation over being asked…

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…