(W)hile They Are Still Speaking...

About two years ago, our daughter had gone for a doctor’s appointment some distance from her home. Being into crafts, she stopped in at a large craft store on her way home. The first thing she saw on entering was a display of umbrellas. She couldn’t remember ever seeing umbrellas in a craft store before. She had plenty of umbrellas at home. In fact, she had one in the car. And while the sky was overcast, the forecast had only mentioned possible light scattered showers. But she picked up an umbrella anyway, not knowing why she felt she should.

After returning to her car with her purchases, she headed for the exit out of the shopping plaza. Just then it started to rain. She got to the stop light, and it began to pour. That is when things took an unusual turn. From the back seat came an urgent male voice that said, “Help him!” First, she looked in the back seat, and found to her relief that she was alone in the car. Next she looked around the outside of the car, and saw no one. Then the voice repeated, “Help him!”

She glanced around the car again, and saw an elderly man waking up behind her car in the middle of the roadway. He was pulling one of those collapsible grocery carts, filled, as our daughter described it, with all his earthly possessions. When he reached her door, she rolled down the window and handed him the new umbrella. Astonished, the man thanked her and began to unwrap and open it.

Then the voice in the back seat again said, “Help him!” Not sure what to do next, our daughter thought maybe she should look in her purse for some money for the man, but knew she didn’t have any. She never carried any cash; she used check cards almost exclusively. But she decided to look anyway. She had used her coin purse at the crafts store and knew it was empty. But she dug down deeper to see if there might be something there. At the very bottom she found a $20 bill. Not just an ordinary bill, but a crisp one that looked as if it had just come from the mint. She handed it to the man, who looked at her and said “Bless you. You’re a direct answer to prayer.”

In Isaiah 65:24 the Lord says “It shall come to pass that before they call, I will answer; and while they are still speaking, I will hear.” Our daughter had no need for a new umbrella and didn’t know why she was buying it. She knew there was no money in her purse, yet at the bottom was an unexplained $20 bill, inexplicitly unwrinkled.

But the Lord knew before the rain started that the elderly man would be calling, and was working to meet his need even before the man knew he was in need. What a beautiful experience. As our daughter said that night while relating the story to my wife and me, she had seen her own prayers answered before, but, to her knowledge, she had never before been a direct instrument in helping the Lord answer a prayer.

I see two lessons to be garnered here. First, the Lord is true to His promises. He does answer prayer. Secondly, He wants to use us as His hands in answering prayers, and will do so if we are willing. What a wonderful Lord.

Have a great day, and listen for a voice from your “back seat.”

Dr. G

Who Touched Me?

For the past four years, my office has been right off the school cafeteria. When Kindergarten and First Grade classes line up to return to their classrooms after eating, they line up right outside my door, often banging or kicking it; there is no question that they’re there.

Also most of my years at this school, I’ve had a planning period on one side or the other of my lunch period. So I have the opportunity to eat a little more slowly as I work at my desk or on the computer. That makes the rest of the day go by a little easier.

However, it is not uncommon for me to spend part of this time out with the students who are eating. Except for the Kindergarten classes, the classroom teachers do not eat with their students at lunch. Instead, in half-hour shifts two other staff members will “ride herd” on the seven or eight classes of students as they eat. Each staff member has several assigned duties outside their normal teaching responsibilities. Lunchroom duty lands on many people’s plates. So, if I finish eating early, I go out to help whoever has duty when I’m finished.

Lunchroom duty has several aspects: dismissing classes after eating, retrieving forgotten utensils or condiments, getting a custodian when things get spilled, and, most importantly, keeping the hum of voices from becoming cacophonic bedlam. Theoretically, the children are to talk to their immediate neighbors. When, from my office, I start identifying individual voices, I know it is time for me to come out. I’m sometimes referred to “the bear that lives under the stairs.”

As I roam between tables, I try to interact gently with many students, encouraging them to eat, greeting them by name, generally trying to keep things moving softly and quietly. From time to time, as I pass groups of students, I’ll hear someone call out my name. Often I recognized the voice, sometimes not. In any case, I turn around frowning, and say, “Quien me toca?” which literally means, “Who touched me?” And the children all laugh, for they know the drill. The child who called me will proceed with whatever they wanted. I’m always willing to listen and learn. I’ve learned that so many of our children need someone to talk to. And you never know what you’ll learn. The important thing is that I listen and give as good a response as I can.

Of course, the saying “Who touched me” is scriptural. In both Mark 5 and Luke 8 we find the story of the desperately ill woman who, through the throng of people was able to reach out and touch the hem of Christ’s garment to receive healing. And as soon as it happened, Christ turned and said, “Who touched me?” Not because He didn’t know, but because he wanted to recognize her great faith.

We can’t overlook the question the disciples asked Him. “Lord, with this great big crowd of people who’ve been jostling you all day, why do you suddenly want to know who touched you?” There is an important point to this question that is often overlooked. If touching the hem of His garment could bring the woman immediate healing, where was the healing for all the multitude that had rubbed shoulders and clasped His hand the rest of the time? The answer lies with the praise Christ gave the woman – “Your faith has made you whole.” The rest of the crowd was satisfied with touching Him, or perhaps just seeing Him; believing in Him wasn’t high on their priority lists. Too bad.

When I turn around and ask my question, it isn’t uncommon to see two, three or even four hands shoot up, all claiming to have been responsible. They know I’m their friend and that they can trust me. And Jesus is an even better friend.

We need to believe in Him, and reach out to touch Him, too.

Dr. G

There's a Mouse In The House!

Mice: the animals which stereotypically frighten housewives and terrify elephants. While the house mouse is probably the species which immediately comes to mind at the mention of the word, there are actually many types of mice. There are deer mice (shown at the right), grasshopper mice, harvest mice, meadow mice, and Mickey Mice. I even featured a deer mouse in an earlier article (see “The Terror By Night”, June 6, 2007)

The summer between my sophomore and junior years in college was spent at the Rosario Beach Marine Station (see photo at “When the Waves Get Too Big”, August 1, 2007). The station is on a small bay facing west, and has a small island in the opening. When I was there, the island had significant stands of prickly pear cactus and hordes of deer mice. I spent a large number of afternoons trying to verify the idea that the mouse population could have come from mice stranded on drifting debris which reached the island. After drifting around the bay for up to four hours, three of my twenty navigators were able to get within 5 feet of the goal line. Only one abandoned ship early in the procedure.

But let’s move on to the house mouse. First of all, it is nowhere as cute as the deer mouse. Dingy gray, compared to the nice, neat two-colored coat of the other. It has been in close association with man since time immemorial. The sight of one in the house can bring on a variety of responses: anger, fear, disgust, embarrassment, even dread. They chew on things, they get into things, and they soil things. No one wants a house mouse around.

I started thinking about mice, and realized I really didn’t remember any mention of them in the Bible. We all know to go to the ant, that leopards can’t change their spots, and camels can’t pass through needles' eyes. Dogs eat crumbs from the masters’ tables, and oxen fall into the ditch and are used as excuses not to attend banquets. Fish provide temple tax money; whales redirect wayward prophets, ravens feed repentant prophets, and donkeys can talk.

But what about mice? To my mind, they should be an excellent symbol of sin. Just think of it. They slip into our lives so easily; unless we are really watchful, they can reside with us without our even knowing it. Every mouse that gets into the house must be a pregnant female; if one mouse gets in and isn’t immediately removed, others soon come exploding out of closets, from under beds and behind refrigerators. Let one sin into your life, and if it isn’t removed quickly, others follow in its path.

A single sin can eat you up, destroy what you have. How fitting, I thought, for a mouse. So I decided to look in my Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance. The word mouse appears twice; the Bible lacks the word mice (that’s as close as this blog gets to poetry). The two passages where we find this creature are Lev. 11:29-35 and Isaiah 66:17. And guess what the Lord says about the mouse: it is unclean, and its dead body contaminates (defiles) anything it touches. In other words, the mouse does symbolize or represent sin.

To be sure we are rid of mice and sin, we need an exterminator. Praise the Lord, there is One!

By the way, have you been nibbling my cookie, or should I look behind the couch?

Dr. G

What Am I Doing Here?

The Olentangy River runs through Columbus, Ohio, in a north-south direction, joining the Scioto River close to downtown. Back when I was attending The Ohio State University in Columbus, much of the western bank of the Olentangy north of Columbus (north of Route 161) was undeveloped, and accessible from the road running parallel to it.

We had developed a group of friends, who, one Sunday afternoon, decided to go canoeing on the river. There were to be three canoes, with me and a doctor friend, Walter, in the middle canoe. Walter seemed to have confidence in his canoeing skills.

When I was about nine years old I had received a book entitled “Paddle-to-the-Sea,” about a model canoe and paddler carved by a young Native American up north of Lake Superior. It told the story of how the model had traversed the Great Lakes and on out to the Grand Banks where it was picked up by a fishing boat. A few years later, when I was about eleven I received a book about three brothers (the Waltons) who had adventures as they took a canoeing trip down the Penobscot River in Maine. Its title was “Rapids Ahead.” At the end of my freshman year in college, my maternal grandfather drowned while canoeing alone on the McKenzie River near Leaburg, Oregon. That was the extent of my experience with canoes.

Let’s see. When I did reading remediation a few weeks back, I emphasized that proper stories have a Who, What, Where, When and Why. I’ve got the Where, the Who, and the What. It is time to add the When. Not infrequently, during winter, the Olentangy freezes over. This particular year, it had also frozen, but in early January we’d had a thaw, and the river was running free. Because of recent rains and the melting of snow, the river was a little higher than usual. One of the men in the group, who always seemed to be very precise about such things, announced that the river water was at 37 degrees Fahrenheit. This from a man who had been known to take the temperature of his coffee, so who was I to doubt him?

I was a little concerned when Walter put on his wet suit. I had a dry suit (blue jeans, several sweat shirts, a stocking cap and tennis shoes), and I wanted to keep it dry. We pushed off into the river several miles upstream from Route 161, planning on shooting a low dam somewhere downstream (a couple of the wives had parked several cars for us there and had then gone home). The water was running a little swifter than any of the experienced group expected, but we figured that would just make the trip to the dam that much shorter.

There were standing waves in the middle of a normally calm and peaceful river that day. I tried to paddle as fast as I could from the front, but somehow Walter’s end of the canoe caught up with me and passed me as we turned broadside just as we came to some rather larger waves. My dry suit lasted for about 100 yards of the trip. Needless to say, the experience was shocking. And I remember thinking almost immediately, “What am I doing here?”

We were able to work the canoe to shallow water where we emptied it, climbed back in and continued downstream. I was quite blue and shaking rather violently when we reached the cars. I was put into one with the heater running full blast while the others shot the dam for a while. Then I was taken home and put in a tub of warm water to finish thawing out. Since then I’ve avoided people who go canoeing.

“What am I doing here?” Do you suppose Jonah asked that question while hiding down in that boat? Maybe some of the Israelites asked it when they went up to do battle when the Lord had specifically told them to stay home. After the crucifixion, Peter went back to his fishing boat. Do you suppose he asked himself, “What am I doing here?” Such an important question; important enough that it must be asked before making major decisions, rather than afterwards, when we find ourselves in a difficult situation. But why leave it with only the major decisions? Don’t leave home without it at any time.

The “Why” of the story? Easy. We didn’t ask first.

Dr. G