Happy Birthday

With birthdays on the 6th, 7th, 8th, 9th and beyond, October was birthday month for our family as I was growing up. After church, we’d gather for a birthday dinner at Grandma’s followed by thick slabs of red velvet cake. Grandpa once confessed – after more than sixty years of October gatherings and countless slices of cake – that red velvet was not his favorite, but it has remained one of mine.

I remember just one October birthday party with school friends. As socially awkward then as now, I turned cartwheels on the lawn in my skirted girl scout uniform, giving everyone a peek at my underwear.

I was glad our son got a birthday of his own – October 5th. As of 2:07 this morning, he is 18! Although I hope his plans for today do not include any of these things, he could now enter into a contract, marry a sweetheart, gamble away his tuition money, rent an apartment or buy property, consent to medical treatment, serve on a jury, buy cigarettes or a gun.

Always curious, opinionated and wildly inclusive – I do hope he will exercise his new privilege to vote. Our words and actions – in and out of the voting booth–help to shape the communities and world we live in. I hope he will participate fully, using his brain and his gifts and his faith to make the world a better place.

Federal law also requires that he register for the selective service—in a crisis, our son could be drafted into military service. Although I'm not turning cartwheels about this sobering possibility, we live in a complex and conflicted world – one that may always need soldiers. All of them sons and daughters.

Law and privilege, rights and responsibility – happy birthday to our much-loved son as he grows into these gifts of early adulthood. 

Shhhh

Shhh. Our son is home from college for the night. This afternoon he negotiated on his bike from dorm to light rail station to his occasional job off campus. His shift ended too late to safely reverse those steps, so we offered to pick him up and return him to campus. Or home. His choice. Only a week in, it's an awkward return -- no toothbrush, not enough pillows, his room still disheveled from his recent departure. His sister welcomes best -- waiting up for the briefest glimpse, glad he's home to eat the muffins she'd baked. It's my equivalent of a school night as I make a list of loose ends for tomorrow's full morning of rally day activities at church. My desire to stay up and listen is thwarted by his weariness and my own. I'll be up and out of the house before he wakes tomorrow. He'll be long gone by the time I return. Shhhh.

Got ten minutes?

This week, our congregation sent a group to Greeley, Colorado to learn and serve in a community that experienced horrendous flooding last year. On the way, they ate a meal in North Platte, Nebraska. Although I imagine our youth were unimpressed with North Platte, the small city does boast the world's largest railroad yards, Bailey Yard. And it was once the home of a tremendous example of outrageous welcome and hospitality.  

Some time ago, I read a book called Once Upon a Town, The Miracle of the North Platte Canteen by Bob Greene. The Union Pacific Railroad's main line runs through North Platte and during World War II, trains carrying our troops on their way to or from the war traveled through the town. The trains stopped for no more than fifteen minutes for fueling or unloading or to add or change cars. On Christmas Day 1941, thinking their own sons from the local 134th Infantry Regiment were on the trains, the people of North Platte decided to greet them as they rolled through town. Gifts, food, words of encouragement and thanks were lavishly shared with the young men – who turned out to be strangers, not their own. 

The miracle part of the story is that the people of North Platte and surrounding communities made a commitment to greet every single troop train that came through town as long as the war lasted. On an average day, three to five thousand military personnel passed through the canteen, and toward the end of the war as many as twenty-three trains passed through each day. Over six million soldiers were welcomed and fed during the war, day and night, day after day, and year after long year.

Remember, most of the people served by the canteen were there for only ten or fifteen minutes. They gobbled down homemade pie and roast beef sandwiches. They flirted and danced with the young women whose job it was to greet the trains. They accepted sloppy kisses and firm handshakes from women and men who could have been their mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers. And then they were gone. Yet the book describes the life-long impact those ten minutes had on those who gave and received the gift of such generous hospitality. 

Ten minutes. What a lingering impression a warm greeting can have on a Sunday morning! Ten minutes could ward off a sense of isolation and depression for someone who is struggling. A compliment for a well-behaved child, a question about an illness, a thank-you for the lovely music could have a long-lasting impact both on people we already know and those who are new. Maybe outreach and evangelism aren't as complicated and difficult as we tend to think. Ten minutes to intentionally and generously share Christ’s love and hospitality with your spouse, a child, your mother, a visitor, a co-worker, your boss, even a complete stranger – those ten minutes could transform a congregation, a community, you, me. 

Let me know if you have been to North Platte– or if you'd like to borrow the book! Pray for young people and adults on summer mission trips that they might be outrageously welcomed as the spirit of God works through them to welcome and bless others. 

Remembering

Preparing the bulletin and worship service for this Sunday, I had a flashback to one of the many firsts of my first year as pastor. Memorial Day weekend snuck up on me. Although I had prepared prayers of gratitude for those who had died serving our country, I neglected to ask about other traditions the congregation valued.

That Sunday morning, as I sought the too-late advice of the volunteer who deftly handles the nitty gritty details of worship, something caught my eye outside. Fluttering. Actually, a flurry of fluttering. Small American flags lined both sides of the sidewalk leading to the church. "Uh-oh," I thought to myself.

Those flags raised the expectation for something that was not going to be happening in worship that day. Like patriotic music. Like red, white and blue sprinkles at coffee hour. Like scriptural assurance that God had a special soft spot for our corner of the world. I quickly moved to the other entrance. More flags. More fluttering. Suddenly, I couldn't remember if there was a flag in our worship space or fathom what I would do with it if there was.

Improvising at the beginning of the service, I was moved to tears when dozens of veterans stood to be recognized - some had served long ago in far-flung places, some had returned from the Middle East just days before. Five years later, that group has dwindled - lost to other battles with cancer, kidney failure, dementia, suicide.

I might quibble about secular holidays creeping into worship, but I hope to never pass up an opportunity to bless the people in front of me. To listen to and honor their stories. To thank them and to give thanks for them.

"Hi, it's me."

Something startling happens when I call my mom's cell phone and she doesn't answer. The voice mail greeting reminds me, in my sister-in-law's familiar voice:

"Ron Gray is not available." 

Tell me about it. From a dripping ceiling in our daughter's room to our congregation's looming capital campaign; from our son's pending high school graduation to farmers preparing their fields for spring planting - I'm acutely aware of my father's absence. Even after a year and a half, the declaration stills jars me.

My parents held on to their first cell phone for years, passing up free upgrades and newer models in favor of one they knew how to use. Once bound by the awkwardness of a party-line shared with neighbors up and down their rural road, mom and dad learned to text. Once cautious about the expense of long distance calling, they learned to call for no reason - unlimited minutes were used to report monarch sightings or a new kitten or the death of a neighbor or a funny story.

I suspect that clunky cell phone, replaced only after my dad's death, sits in a kitchen drawer at the farm. Though its chirping crickets and croaking frog ringtone is now silenced, it still holds little bits and pieces of our lives - texts and pictures and voice mail messages collected and forgotten over many years. That it once had the power to connect me to my dad on the best and worst of days or for no reason at all makes it - for now, for me - too precious to throw away or recycle.

My mom is savvy enough to change the greeting on her new phone - but I hope she won't.

A good mechanic is hard to find.

For years, we've taken our broken-down vehicles to a trusted mechanic in town. Once, after a hose of some importance let loose a spectacular plume of steam and smoke, I pulled over our aging van to give him a call. I described what had happened and asked if I could still drive the five miles to his shop if I stopped now and then to add some water to the radiator. "You will turn a small problem into a very big problem if you do," he warned. "Words to live by," I thought, as the kids and I waited for the tow truck.

In the grubby powder blue lobby of his shop, he stubbed out his cigarettes so I wouldn't breathe the smoke and listened carefully when I imitated the alarming sounds initiated only by a right hand turn at certain speeds. He told the truth when there was nothing to fix. He laughed his head off when, in my desperation to pick up a repaired vehicle, I propelled my son's razor scooter a mile and a half to get there in my work clothes, arriving sweaty and flustered and ridiculous victorious. For years we heeded his advice, nursing a few more miles and a few more years out of the very small fleet of vehicles we've owned over the last decade.

Without explanation or notice, the shop is closed, the parking lot emptied of sagging vehicles, the mechanic gone. I wish we had thanked him more.

Anyone know a good mechanic?