A note to restaurants about How to Serve Tea

 Sadly, the state of tea service in the United States is deplorable.

I wrote about this ten years ago.  Of course, since this is an obscure blog (I was hard pressed to locate it myself, today!)-- it made no difference.

Although there is almost certainly nothing to be gained by my writing about it again, I feel the need, as I observe the niceties of life vanishing all around me, to express some things here in my private corner.  Perhaps there is something to be gained.  It will help me feel better.

Tea is a comfort and a gift.  A warm cup of tea gives you something to do.  You hold it, inhale the fragrant steam, test the temperature with small sips.  Tea with a friend is a lovely experience, especially if combined with a small morsel of tasty baking, or a square of chocolate.

If you are a restaurant owner or manager, training your waitstaff to serve tea, here is a list of protocol to help you make your customers' experience the best possible:

***Purchase the proper equipment***  

Teapots  Tea for two should be served in a 24-32 oz. teapot, preferably an insulated teapot (tea for one should be served in a 12-16 oz. teapot). A nice ceramic teapot is even better wrapped in a tea cozy or a cute tea towel to add insulation.

Cups and saucers  Tea is nice in a mug, but this is a very informal way to have it. It is delightful to pour small cups of tea from one's insulated pot.  Small cups are easy to finish while the temperature is optimal. Saucers give a nice finish to the experience and provide a spot to rest your spoon. An extra saucer can hold a few lemon wedges for those who prefer their tea with lemon.

Trays A tray is a wonderful vehicle for gathering your teas service together and presenting it aesthetically.  To elevate the experience up another notch, add a pretty white doily to line the tray.

Small caddies  You will want to serve sugar, perhaps both white and turbinado.  Many tea drinkers love to use honey instead of sugar, so adding that option is a beautiful touch.  You can buy all these sweeteners in individual packets, which is the nicest way to handle sticky substances in a public eating establishment.  Be sure to contain them in a pretty little caddy that is easy to maneuver.

Cream pitchers  You can serve cream in the little packets with tear off tops, or in a proper cream pitcher.  Either is fine; just make sure to provide plenty.  

Timers A particularly beautiful touch when serving tea, a timer lets your customers know how long their tea has steeped.

Tea selection I assume that I am writing for a regular restaurant that wants to serve tea nicely, and not a tea house.  A tea house should know all this, and have special equipment to heat water to the optimal temperature for each type of tea that might be requested.  A tea house will obviously have a special selection of teas based on the owner's personal research and experience, and probably loose leaf at that.  But for a regular restaurant, you should offer a selection that includes: 

•     Regular and decaf varieties of a good black tea.  Twinings is probably the easiest good tea to procure.  PG Tips is excellent. Do not offer Lipton.
•     Regular and decaf varieties of an Earl Gray or a Lady Gray tea
•     Chai tea
•     Jasmine tea
•     An herbal lemon tea
•     An herbal mint tea
•     An herbal spice tea with warm spices like cinnamon, clove and/or cardamom
•     A chamomile tea
•     An herbal berry tea

***Train your servers to serve tea***

First off, you need to have a ready supply of hot water.  If you can obtain a vessel that will hold water between 205-210 degrees F, that would be perfect.  Ideally, the water provided for a tea order should be just under the boiling point.  It takes on a different flavor once it boils, even after it cools down a few degrees, and a true tea connoisseur will taste it, although many people do not notice or mind.  The most important thing, however, is that the water is hot enough. In my personal opinion, too hot is far preferable to not hot enough.

When a customer orders tea, the tea selection should be displayed immediately, and the customer should make a selection.  If two customers are taking tea together, they can share one pot of water if they select the same tea.  If they desire to drink different varieties of tea, each should have his or her own pot. One teabag produces up to 16 oz. of tea, so you need a one bag for an individual pot, two for a shared pot.

After the tea is selected, the server should ask, "Do you take your tea with cream or lemon?" and note the response.  There are teas which are never taken with one or the other, but generally it is always good to ask.

The server then retires to assemble the tea tray:  

• First, place the doily in the center of the tray (if you are using doilies).  
• Then place either one or two cups and saucers on opposite edges of the tray, at 9:00 and 3:00.  
• Wrap a spoon in a napkin and tuck it alongside the cup on the saucer.  
• Place a small caddy of assorted sweeteners (sugar, turbinado sugar, honey, stevia) just forward of the center of the tray. 
• Place a saucer of either cream cups or lemon wedges forward of the sweeteners, along the edge of the tray at 6:00. 
• Tuck in a 3 minute hourglass timer with its sand all in the bottom.  
• Place the requested tea bag(s) into your pocket.  
• After all is set, fill the appropriate sized teapot with hot water and place it on the tray in the remaining spot near 12:00.  Wrap or cover the teapot with a tea towel. You do this step last so you can best preserve the water temperature.

The server serves the tea:

• Deliver the tray promptly to the table!  At the table, place the tray attractively before your customer.  
• Remove the tea bag from your pocket, open it in front of your customer, commenting on how lovely it smells, and what a fine choice has been made.  
• Place the tea bag(s) into the teapot full of hot water.  
• Replace the lid of the pot and the towel, so the tea can stay hot as it steeps.  
• Flip over the hourglass timer and tell the customer that the tea will be perfectly steeped and ready to pour when the sand runs out.  
• Ask if there is anything else you can provide.  
• Smile and promise to check back in a few minutes (and do!).

Play beautiful music, like Mozart, Vivaldi, Telemann and Handel.  Play it softly.  Special bonus points for a fresh flower in a bud vase on each table.  The aromas of fresh bakery items, cinnamon, vanilla, strawberries and chocolate may stimulate additional sales.

Oh, wouldn't it be lovely to find a little place that does this?

Musings on the Trinity

I will begin with a confession:  I have some hangups concerning the doctrine of the Trinity.

When I was a little child, I learned that Jesus is God.  I accepted this, and when I was a child, it was not any problem or leap of logic for me.

When I got a bit older, I encountered the idea of the Trinity: Father, Son and Holy Spirit.  My understanding was that God is the Father, Jesus is the Son, and (forgive me) The Holy Spirit doesn't matter very much because we don't believe in speaking in tongues.

Five to seven years ago, the Lord reached out to me (I have no better way to describe it) and invited me to search in the Bible for whatever I could learn about the Holy Spirit.  It began when I was going through an extended crisis, rife with devastation and panic.  I often found myself on the floor of my closet, in tears, praying.  Often I prayed Romans 15:13 (which I had stumbled across on my own, although recently I seem to hear it quoted often).  I noticed that when I prayed Romans 15:13, a blanket of peace would descend on me and cover me, calming and comforting me.  As I experienced this peace, I thought about the words of scripture I was praying, how they ended with, "...through the power of the Holy Spirit."   Through the power of the Holy Spirit.  This palpable blanket of peace was coming from the Holy Spirit.  Mystified, I prayed, "Who are you?  I know God.  I know Jesus.  But who are you?"  

I began to seek answers.  First I searched on my own, using commentaries to dig through the Bible from beginning to end, drinking up every mention of the Holy Spirit.  Eventually the Lord, in His unfathomable mercy, gave me the opportunity to teach a Bible study about the Holy Spirit.  I always learn best when I need to prepare to explain something to somebody else, and when I can talk things through with other people.  God allowed me to learn about His Holy Spirit in that context, and I am so very thankful.

This is not the appropriate place to try to record everything God showed me.  I will suffice to say that my conclusion has been that the Holy Spirit is God as He interacts with us in our present age, our Immanuel, to draw from Matthew 1:22-23.  The Holy Spirit is the Spirit of Jesus (Romans 8:9, Galatians 4:6), who abides with us always.  This is not an exhaustive explanation, but it is the most applicable part of what I am able to understand.  I have come to treasure Luke 11:13, where the Lord Jesus himself promises that God the Father will give the Holy Spirit generously to those who ask Him.

In pondering the Holy Spirit, I began to recoil from theology that seems to separate the parts of the triune  Godhead into three distinct personalities.  Now, many professing Christians believe that God the Father is the Old Testament God, and He is mean-spirited, vengeful, bent on harsh judgment.  They believe that Jesus the Son is the New Testament's enlightened next-generation deity, kind, gentle and full of grace, turning His Father's unquenchable wrath away from us, rescinding the Old Testament and consigning righteousness to irrelevance in the age of grace.  I was aware of this, and convinced by what I read in scripture that it is grossly inaccurate.  Jesus said that He did not come to abolish the law, but to fulfill it, and that the law will not disappear until heaven and earth do (Matthew 5:18).  Jesus told us our righteousness will need to surpass the righteousness of the scribes and the Pharisees if we hope to enter the kingdom of heaven.  I believed this, but did not quite understand it until I began to learn about the Holy Spirit and how He lives in us and purifies us, changing us, transforming us into the very image of Christ, through a gradual but certain process.  We can become righteous because the Spirit of Christ abides in us, and we in Him, and this union produces authentic righteousness, unattainable by any other means.

The Holy Spirit transforms us into the image of Christ because He is Christ, living in us (Colossians 1:27).  Pondering this led me to think about how the Holy Spirit is the Lord Jesus Christ, in Spirit.  And the Lord Jesus is God (John 10:30, John 14:9-11).  I understand the Trinity as God the Father, first, and then God the Son, who came among us, and finally God the Spirit, who actually enters into us.  Of course, this triune God has existed in entirety throughout eternity past and will continue to exist into future eternity. The fluctuating part of the equation is us, as we experience Him.  When we finally get to heaven and receive our full glorification, we will experience the Lord in all His fullness, in His kingdom.

Again, I do not claim to have perfect or complete understanding.  Yet, what I do understand makes me shudder when I hear the members of the Trinity discussed as if they are three separate people with distinct personalities.  I believe that the unity of the Trinity is much more significant than the distinctions therein.  The Trinity is not a term found in the Bible.  It is a compiled teaching from classic historical church doctrine.  Wise, learned and God-fearing men wrestled with scripture and labored together intensely to assemble an interpretation and explanation of how we might comprehend the various references to Father, Son and Holy Spirit found throughout the Bible.

My initial foray into these matters sprang from an experience I had with the Holy Spirit, who called my attention to His existence.  In retrospect, I think it may have been related to a prayer I prayed when I was in deep distress, begging for comfort, expressing that I wished Jesus were tangibly with me, in a way I could process with my senses, my flesh-and-bone God.  Jesus demonstrated that He is with me, truly with me, not figuratively or metaphorically, but really (in the literal sense of the word really--for real).  Jesus demonstrated that His Spirit, the Spirit of Christ in me and with me eternally--my foretaste and guarantee of an eternal future in the unveiled fullness of God--is, just as He promised, better than having a flesh-and-bone person ready to hop over from the next room to help me (John 16:7).  But just as I began to grasp some understanding about who the Holy Spirit is, and how He completes God's promises in me, I began to wonder about Jesus.

Jesus Christ, the Son of God.  As I child, I knew Him as the baby in the manger, the kind Healer, the crucified Savior, the risen Lord.  My Sunday school teachers told me, "Jesus is God," and I never doubted them.  When I grew to be an adult, I noticed that the Bible mentions Jesus having been around a long time before He was born in Bethlehem.  The Spirit of Christ was in the Old Testament prophets who foretold Him (1 Peter 1:11--I had never been exactly sure what this meant).  Through Jesus, all things were created (Colossians 1:16); this was an amazing realization for me.  Jesus had been designated to be our Savior even before creation (1 Peter 1:20).  These ideas surprised me when I first discovered them, but they made sense; they fit into my framework of understanding.  Jesus is God.  God is eternal.  Therefore Jesus is eternal.

But then came the problem of Jesus' body.  This is a problem because Jesus is God, and God is immutable, which means that God does not change.  Consequently, Jesus does not change.  Indeed, Hebrews 13:8 tells us that Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today and forever.  Yet, Jesus did not have a body in eternity past, but then He entered our time-continuum and took on a body.  For a number of years, I simply assumed that Jesus Christ's physical body was an aberration, something that happened for a short period of time before Jesus reverted to His unembodied form in heaven with the Father.  But Jesus rose in His body; in other words, His body was resurrected.  He ascended to heaven in His body, and He will return for us in this same body (Acts 1:11).  His body, with the marks of His crucifixion, sits on the throne of heaven with the Father (Revelation 5:6).  His body has been raised as we also will be raised, to eternal glory.  He is the firstborn among many brothers (Romans 8:29).  When we see Him, we will be like Him (1 John 3:2).

How does this work?  How can it be that Jesus Christ--who is the same yesterday, today and forever--could exist in oneness with God the Father and the Spirit throughout eternity past, but then could take on a body that He will carry into eternity future?  How can this be?  Isn't changing from spirit to flesh the very definition of mutability?

For a long time I mostly dealt with this by not thinking about it.  Then we ran splat into it while studying the Westminster Catechism in Sunday school yesterday, and all my questions and uncertainties came bubbling back up.  Some kind people took my perplexity seriously and pondered with me.  I asked, "Does it just mean that the essence of God is immutable? And that Jesus could change, as long as in essence He did not change?"  I did not like the feel of that explanation.

In the process of deliberation, we considered a question raised by someone wiser than I: "Who and what is Jesus Christ the Son of God, fundamentally?" This question unlocked something in my mind, and it dawned on me that Jesus was the Promised One, all the way since Genesis 3:15, and even before.  Jesus was the Promise, since eternity past, since before the foundations of the world.  In ages past, He was the Promise to come.  Then He came, and He fulfilled the Promise.  2 Corinthians 1:20 tells us that no matter how many promises God has made, they are all yes in Christ Jesus: the Promise given, the Promise fulfilled, the Word of God kept.  Jesus did not change. He is as immutable as every other aspect of God. He is the physical representation of the faithfulness of God's promises.  What God says never changes.  The Word of God never changes. Jesus never changes.

The grass withers, the the flowers fall, but the word of our God will stand forever.

Isaiah 40:8 ESV

And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, 

and we have seen His glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, 

full of grace and truth.

John 1:14 ESV

I love it when I gain some understanding that really gets into me, leading me to reprocess all kinds of things in a deeper and more meaningful way.  Thank you, Jesus.

2023 Word of the Year

photo credit: pexels.com-kaboompix

It is January, nearly the end of January, and I have struggled to settle on my word of the year.

This past year, my word was CONFIDENCE.  I haven't gotten any farther with that than I did the two years my word was HUMILITY, or the year my word was LISTEN.  (If you are interested in a review of my words of the year, you can read this.)

I'm still working on all the words I've ever chosen.  Honestly, it's reasonable and healthy to accept the idea that perfecting any of these qualities in one's life is utterly beyond the scope of a pre-glorified mortal being.  Yet, even though I will never attain perfection in any area (this side of eternity), I can grow, and by God's grace, I do grow.  Some day, the growth might even be visible.  When I leave my garden for a week in the early summer, upon returning I often marvel to see the growth that happened during my absence, growth I would not have perceived had I been there all along.

God has graciously helped me grow in one concretely measurable way-- scripture memorization.  Each year when I find a word that challenges me and captures my contemplation, I look for scripture to underscore it. These Bible verses, connected to or actually containing my words-of-the-year, resonate with my heart in a special way, making them easier to memorize.

Recently, a passage has been on my heart:

Isaiah 44:2-5

Thus says the Lord who made you,

who formed you from the womb and will help you:

Fear not, O Jacob my servant,

Jeshurun whom I have chosen.

For I will pour water on the thirsty land,

and streams on the dry ground;

I will pour my Spirit on your offspring,

and my blessing on your descendants.

They shall spring up among the grass

like willows by flowing streams.

This one will say, 'I am the Lord's,'

Another will call on the name of Jacob,

and another will write on his hand, 'The Lord's,'

and name himself by the name of Israel.

I can't get over the beauty of the section that says, "They shall spring up among the grass like willows by flowing streams."

My word for the year this year will be TREE... like the willow tree in Isaiah 44, but also the cypress and acacia, fig trees and olive trees, oaks of righteousness and the cedars that undergirded the Temple of God.  Most importantly, I will meditate on the cross, the tree that was both a blessing and a curse, the most terrible and most wonderful tree in all history.  And I will not forget the Tree of Life that springs from the river of the water of life in heaven, yielding twelve kinds of fruit, year round, producing leaves to heal the nations.

I think I'll have quite a few new verses to learn.

A good Christmas

When we bought this North Carolina house, we loved the woods around it.  We did not, however, examine these woods very closely.

While we were moving into this house, we went out on the screen porch to sit and rest a bit.  I noticed that the woods were closer than I had realized.  One tree in particular was incredibly tall, and close.  Sitting on the screen porch, I had the feeling I could reach out and touch that giant tree.  Of course I couldn't, but it gave that feeling, a very, very close feeling.  It shot up like a telephone pole, only farther.  It had no branches until it ascended above the canopy of the other trees, and then it extended a small bush of greenery like a plume above a hat.

I noticed, on that move-in day, that the giant tree swayed forebodingly when the wind blew.

I loved that tree, but I was also afraid of it.  I thought we should take it out, but I couldn't bear the thought.  On stormy nights, it always haunted me.  I often prayed that it would not fall on our house.  I once read an Anne Tyler book about a man who lost his wife when a tree fell on their house.  That book came back to me many times, as I lived under the shadow of our tallest tree.

On December 23, we had strong winds.  I told Shawn that I would really like a generator for Christmas, and asked if he would find me one, "today." 

I ought to have prefaced this by saying that we did not do much about presents this year.  I am completely over the whole Christmas present tradition.  We are so rich, as a culture; we have everything we want or need.  Whenever we want or need something, we immediately get it for ourselves, usually from Amazon.  There is no delayed gratification, no waiting until Christmas like there used to be in the old days.  We have so much stuff, we actually have a much greater need of getting rid of things than of procuring them.  Our houses are stuffed to the gills and need to be cleared.  There are entire books, blogs and "courses" devoted to teaching people how to purge useless material items from their lives.  This year I decided to get my kids something very small but hopefully fun or useful, so they would have a package to open, and then accompany this with a monetary gift in (I hope) a significant amount.  So anyway, Shawn and I had agreed to not buy anything for each other.  But on December 23, I felt a deep desire in my soul for a generator, and I asked him to get us one. "It can be our gift to each other," I said.

Shawn headed out to Harbor Freight. Shannon had graced us with her delightful presence, flying in from Boston, so she and I headed to the gym. Shannon and I arrived home before Shawn. I was in my bedroom, cleaning up post-workout, when I looked out the window and saw Shawn in the backyard.  It surprised me to see someone back there, but my startled nerves calmed when I saw that it was my own husband.

He came in after a bit and asked, "Have you looked in the backyard?" I replied, "I saw you in the the backyard." Well, turns out he was in the backyard because, upon driving up to the house, he noticed immediately that our tall tree had fallen.  I ran to the window, and joy flooded my being: The tree fell, and it fell away from the house.  Shawn is sad because he loved that magnificent tree. But I am tremendously relieved that it is down.  Also, now we will be able to measure how tall it was; I've always wondered.

Also we were the proud owners of a new generator.  And the next morning, Christmas Eve, we woke up to a power outage and had to use our generator right away.  We made coffee, connected the internet, plugged in the refrigerator, and even started up a little space heater.

What a great Christmas! And due to the downsizing of gifts, there was never any big mess to clean up, either.

I have struggled to wrap my heart and mind around the true meaning of the birth of Christ this year... not that I don't believe it.  I absolutely do believe!  It's just that my affections were not engaged the way I would have hoped.  I will write about this more, in 2023.

Thankful for a November Miracle

God works things out in the most interesting ways.

For instance, He saw to it that Christmas would be correlated with the winter solstice, the day when light first, almost imperceptibly, begins to increase against the darkness.  I mention this often, because it continually amazes me.

God likewise connected the spring equinox with Easter, that glorious celebration of Jesus' victory over darkness.  Not only is light increasing, but the spring equinox marks the day when there is more light than darkness in each day.

We can also ponder how Thanksgiving, and other harvest celebrations, happen when light is decreasing the most, when there are more hours of dark in a day than hours of light, and the darkness expands until the winter solstice--the birth of the Messiah--signals the awaited change in light.  But in the weeks before the winter solstice, when lack of sunshine symbolically represents our earthly brokenness most clearly, we find ourselves exhorted to give thanks and look forward to when the tide of darkness will begin to turn back.

Of course, these things only apply in the northern hemisphere. Yet, approximately 87% of the world's population lives in the northern hemisphere.  Nearly 90%.  This is surely worth pondering.

Speaking of the days leading up to the winter solstice, my mother was born at the beginning of November. She turned ninety this year.  Ninety years ago, a tiny baby girl was born at the end of a harsh Minnesota autumn, into a world of bare-branched black trees and bitter blowing winds.  She was the final hurrah, the ninth of nine in a large, depression-era family, a fragile speck of almost invisible beauty and hope in need of all the warm, worn blankets they could scrounge up for her.

Now she is ninety and can't remember very many things when she tries to recall them, although she remembers quite a lot when she is able to relax and allow the memories to drift into her mind.  She is fragile and tiny once again, but very industrious, even though it hurts her back when she gets down on her hands and knees to wipe the floors.

I was there for her birthday, back in the home where I grew up, the one place that has remained the same all these years while I have moved from state to state, selling, donating and discarding so many of the random artifacts that signified my life.  When we left New York, I worked as hard as I could to winnow properly, but ran out of time, the net result being that the stuff from the main floor and upstairs were mostly adequately curated, but the boxes from the back of the basement were loaded up and moved as they were, so we ended up with an odd assortment of the things I wanted and valued most, strange objects from a past I could hardly remember, and some legitimate rubbish.  When we left Illinois, we had to pay for the move ourselves, so I parted with breathtaking portions of our belongings, including many things I sorely miss when I see them in photos.  I can easily slip into grief if I think about it, although of course we have more than enough to meet all our needs, and a number of new things besides.  

All this to say that there is a sort of comfort in going back to my parents' home and living amongst the familiar: children's books that Dad read to me when I was a little child, and the Oneida Twin Star silverware, the same pattern that First Baptist kept in their church kitchen.  Gold plastic cups my brother brought home from a plastic factory where he worked during college, a painting of penguins I made in 5th grade that has hung ever since on the laundry room wall.  The closet in the bedroom where I slept as a teenager contains a row of dresses my mom sewed for me.  We used to go to Minnesota Fabrics to pick out a pattern and fabric together, and she made the dresses I wore to church.  There they still are, cotton print memories with full skirts.  The green shag carpet my parents installed in my early childhood bedroom is still on the floor, more than 50 years later, and it has been vacuumed more than 5,148 times (I used a formula to arrive at that number).  I still remember the joyful disbelief I felt when they were willing to install green shag carpet for me, because I had always dreamed of having a floor that looked like grass.

I was nervous about flying to Minnesota by myself, although I wanted to go, and I thought the Lord also wanted me to go.  I had a 6 a.m. flight, so we got up in the middle of the night and left our house at 4:00, planning to arrive at the airport by around 4:30 because Shawn always says you don't need to be at the airport two full hours early, regardless of official advice.  Usually when we fly, Shawn handles both of our tickets on his phone.  When I have flown alone, Shawn has always printed out my boarding pass so I can hold a paper copy.  For some reason, this time I told him not to bother printing me a boarding pass, so on the way to the airport, I practiced navigating to my boarding pass on my phone until I felt confident.

We arrived at the airport after having to take a detour to a different exit off I-40, and we navigated through a maze of construction cones in front of the terminal.  Shawn heaved my 45 pound suitcase out of the trunk; I gathered myself and my wits together.  We said our good-byes, Shawn driving away into the dark pre-morning, and I heading inside to check my bag.  I approached the kiosk to print out my luggage tag and, needing my ticket, reached into the pocket on the side of my purse where I keep my phone.  It was empty.  "What?" I whispered, "Please, God."  The pocket was definitely empty.  I unzipped my purse to check inside, rummaging through a number of times, soon realizing that no, I did not have my phone.  My first instinct was to call Shawn and tell him, but of course I could not do that.  

I quickly scanned my surroundings and saw a very normal and kind looking man in line a few feet away from me. "Pardon me, I'm sorry to bother you, but I seem to have left my phone in my husband's car, and he is driving away right now.  Do you think I could borrow your phone?" I desperately blurted out.

"Oh, no problem," he said, handing me his phone.  I fumbled around and dialed Shawn as quickly as I could.  There was no answer.  I left a message, telling him, "I don't know when you will get this, but you have my phone." Then I helplessly told the man, "He didn't pick up," irrationally fearing that he would be cross and not allow me to try a second call to my phone.

"Call your phone?" he suggested.

"Yes," I said, "Yes, thank you.  I'm sure he'll see it.  It will light up."  I called my phone, but the call went directly to voicemail.  I was stunned.

"It will be okay," the man said, "You can go get in line, and they will print you a paper ticket.  And you can have your husband overnight your phone to you with FedEx.  You'll get it by tomorrow.  It will be okay.  Don't worry.  We used to fly without our phones all the time, and we were fine."

I thanked him and moved to get into the line.  He asked if I was traveling internationally, and I told him no.  He pointed at the sign above us and said, "This is the international line." Then he pointed across the way, "You need to go over there."  My heart sank as I saw how much longer the domestic flight line was, but I went over and stood in it.  The man called after me, "I hope it works out for you!"

Signs all around me repeated the phrase: "Pre-tagged bag drop."  All the other people in the line had tags on their bags.  The last time I flew with a checked bag, I had approached the counter without a tag on my bag, and the man behind the counter had yelled at me to go back and tag my bag.  I stood in line and thought, "Am I going to get yelled at again?" and, "How will I coordinate with my brother-in-law to pick me up at the airport, without my phone?" and, "I wonder when Shawn will realize that he has my phone?"  I observed the three different people servicing the counter, noticing that the one on the far right seemed significantly more sympathetic than the other two.  I prayed, "God, please let me get the nice one."  I felt completely powerless and dependent.  I prayed, "Thank you God that I am right here close to home, and if I can't reach Shawn, I can borrow another phone to call and ask David or Ashton to come and get me.  I am not stranded in a strange place.  Thank you.  I thought you wanted me to go to Minnesota for my mom's birthday, but if you don't, that's okay.  I won't panic.  It will be okay.  I do not know what is going to happen, or if I am going to see my parents, but you do, Lord.  All I can do is wait and see how you will work this out.  I will wait and see what you do."

Then I was at the head of the line, and it was the nice lady on the far right, motioning me to come over.  And just then I looked over to the far left, and right outside the queue stood Shawn in his blue-green Under Armour shirt, so tall, with his right hand high in the air waving my phone at me.  "I got your message," he called.

I ran over and retrieved my phone from Shawn, and then the nice lady at the counter--she was so kind--helped me tag my bag and get it all squared away.

So it was a miracle, but you have to hear the other side to realize how exquisite a miracle it was.

Shawn, as I said, had driven away into the pre-morning dark.  He was uncharacteristically edgy because of the construction and the detour, and he was trying to concentrate on how best to get back on I-40 west.  He knew he would need to take a right exit, but there was another car on his right, blocking him from getting into the right lane.  He tried to speed up and get ahead of the car, but it matched his speed and sped up, too.  So he tried to slow down and pull in behind the car, but when he slowed down, it also slowed down.  No matter what he did, it matched his speed and blocked him. He was feeling a building sense of annoyance at this "jerk," when he saw my phone lying on the passenger seat.  He thought, "She needs that."  And he realized that he must formulate a plan.  As he was trying to decide what to do, the car on his right swerved left, and he had to swerve left to avoid it, and this maneuver catapulted him onto the left exit that goes straight into the airport parking garage.  So, he continued on into the garage, found a convenient spot to park, and sprinted to the terminal with my phone, hoping he would find me.  Which he did.

After I dropped off my bag, Shawn walked with me to the security line.  We squeezed hands, talked about how thankful we were (although we didn't have a chance to exchange the details of our stories until later), and exchanged hugs (perhaps also a kiss).

The reason Shawn did not hear either of our phones ring is because we always set our phones to "do not disturb" overnight, and it was 4:40 a.m.

But it was okay.  Fear was gone.  God had reaffirmed the trip, His presence, His power, and His compassionate mercy.  In fact, when Shawn left the parking garage, he'd been there for such a short time, he didn't even have to pay anything!

God is always good, but I am especially grateful when He is good in tender and attentive ways that are easy for me to recognize and appreciate.  Miracles make my heart sing.

You are worth more

 

It took me awhile to decide to write about this, but I need to remember.

On the last day of August, I was recovering from a very long road trip.  My gardens regretted the absence of my vigilant care over the course of two extremely hot weeks.

After a day or two of avoiding the garden issue, tending instead to unpacking, laundry, and shopping for groceries, I finally plucked up courage to venture out and have a look at the damage.

Immediately outside the garage, a white chiffon rose-of-Sharon (hibiscus syriacus) stood, prolifically blooming, and also prolifically dropping spent blooms onto the mulch below, in an ever-widening circle.  Duffy loves to eat these dropped blooms; indeed, he is tremendously greedy.  Unfortunately, when he gorges himself on hibiscus flowers, he gets sick, and he never learns. So, with some urgency, I prepared a large cardboard box for gathering plant trimmings and detritus. I knelt at the base of the rose-of-Sharon and began scooping up withered white blossoms.  As I worked, the breeze meandered around me and the sun shifted bright dapples through swaying leaves.  Some sunlight caught a brilliant glimmer of green and blue down in the mulch.  I glanced quickly towards it, expecting to see a dragonfly launch itself and fly away, but except for the light, there was no movement.  What? I whispered, and reached out wonderingly, pulling away the faded white flowers surrounding the radiance.

It was a hummingbird, a tiny, lustrous, fallen hummingbird, lying stone-still on the ground, reflecting green-blue beauty in the midst of a sea of browning white hibiscus petals.  Sadness gutted my heart.  I felt guilty, as though I caused the death, and I felt ashamed for seeing such a tragedy.  Who finds a lifeless hummingbird at the bottom of her shrub?  Isn't this a rhythm of nature that should be private and hidden?  "No, God," I said, "Please, no. Why?"

Still feeling guilty and ashamed, I used a layer of flowers to pick up the almost weightless body without touching it directly.  The tiny head drooped under the weight of the long, elegantly curved beak.  I will never forget the slender black beak, so long in proportion to the body, jutting out from smooth, shining plumage.  I wanted to save this morsel of creation, but how?  I placed it in the cardboard box, on top of a layer of blossoms, and continued gathering, scooping blossoms, filling the box, covering the hummingbird many times over.  In the end, I walked back and forth a number of times before tossing the obscenely full box into our garbage can.  A dull ache in my stomach, a shuddering in my chest, I left off gardening for the day.

The next day I received information that something was going wrong for some people I love dearly.  There was a need for a doctor visit.  I thought of the hummingbird and I prayed, "Please God, no."

Please God, no. Please God, don't let it be.

But it was.

Why? I asked. We all asked.  Why do we have to lose such preciousness?  Why do beautiful, tiny things have to leave us?  Why does life have to be so sad?

Why did the Lord prepare me with the hummingbird?  

Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? And not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your Father.  But even the hairs of your head are all numbered.  Fear not, therefore; you are worth more than many sparrows.  ~Matthew 10:29-31

A sparrow is a common bird, but a hummingbird is a treasure and a delight.  If God sees little gray sparrows fall, of course He sees a tiny, exquisite hummingbird.  And other things even more exquisite.

Why?

"In this world, you will have trouble," Jesus told us.  "But take heart.  I have overcome the world."  ~John 16:33

He has overcome.  He laid down His life to make a bridge for us to reach paradise.

He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.  And He who was seated on the throne said, "Behold, I am making all things new."  Also He said, "Write this down, for these words are trustworthy and true."  ~Revelation 21:4-5

Yet, during this time after Jesus won the victory, but while the New Kingdom gestates slowly within believing hearts, before our future glory appears, Jesus hurts for our brokenness.  The already and the not yet swirl around us in a tension of loss, hope, devastation and beauty. Tension brings strain, and stress, and confusion. He knows. He has compassion for us. He has empathy.

Jesus wept.  ~John 11:35

Jesus weeps for us, His beloved creation, caught in a continuum of sin-stained time that hurts us deeply despite the precious surety of His great promises.  Jesus knows our pain, for He entered time Himself and lived with us.  He has experienced all the pain of life, all the pain of death, and all the pain which is the consequence of all the sins that have ever and will ever be committed.  He knows how painful earth has been for Him, Jesus, God, the perfect, powerful one.  He knows how weak we are in comparison, and how impossible it is for us to bear up under the burden.

Thus, our Lord invites us to trust Him.  He encourages us to come to Him.  He promises to give us rest by coming under the yoke alongside us, bearing the weight of it for us, with His strength.  He loves us.  He longs to gather us into His arms and comfort us.  He promises that He is our strength, our joy, our sufficiency.  He promises that all the pain will be made up for, a billion times over, redeemed perfectly and completely, beyond our wildest imaginations.

We only need to trust and wait.  And the waiting is for a good purpose.  Everything the Lord does is for a good purpose, centered in His desire and plan to save many, many people.  He is waiting for His children to come to Him.  He knows who they are.  And He will not shut the door to eternity until He has gathered all His own into His Kingdom, into His arms.

our defense

 

Indeed, when the Gentiles, who do not have the law, do by nature the things required by the law, they are a law for themselves, even though they do not have the law, since they show that the requirements of the law are written on their hearts, their consciences also bearing witness, and their thoughts now accusing, now even defending them.  ~Romans 2:14, NIV84 [emphasis mine]

Perhaps when God judges us, 

He will hold us accountable for how we handled whatever knowledge we had of Him.

Perhaps it is actually not so much about what we know, 

as about how we respond to what we know, 

or maybe even how

--or if--

we search when we do not know.

Suppose it is a more delicate thing when God judges, than simply, "Did you declare Jesus to be your Lord and Savior?"  Just suppose.  God is not constrained to something that neatly fits within our ability to imagine.  God is far more complex than we can imagine.  Also, he clearly tells us that he looks at the heart, the inner person, not the outer persona.  Confessing Jesus as Lord and Savior is very important, but the Bible also tells us in both Isaiah 45 and Philippians 2 that one day every knee will bow and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord.   The question is not whether you verbally acknowledge his Lordship.  The question is: What was going on in your heart?  Only God himself can answer that question.     

A person in search of God, righteousness, truth and justice will find what he is looking for.  God is not far from any of us, and if we reach out for him, we will find him.  He himself will be the master of our journeys.  Some people find him quickly, while others travel many long, steep and twisted roads on a difficult journey to discover truth.  But those who seek him will find him, even (and this flies in the face of much that has been taught throughout Christendom) if they search until they die and meet him on the threshold of the next life.  Only those who stubbornly refuse to seek, who consistently refuse to see or hear, who perpetually insist on following their own way, will be condemned. 

Understanding this requires some finesse.  We are easily deceived concerning our own actions and motivations.  We often embark upon testing a hypothesis after we have already made up our minds what the result should be.  As this "discovery process" unfolds, we skew our interpretation of the facts we uncover, twisting them to match our preconceived belief about what the result should be.  Those who are inclined to believe that there is a God will, admittedly, be biased towards seeing God's presence in their lives.  Many secularly minded souls are quick to point this out and belittle people of faith.  But the opposite is also true: those who are inclined to scoff at the idea that there is a God will be biased towards explaining him away, despite any evidence they encounter.   Very intelligent people go to extreme lengths to construct labyrinthian philosophies of life that allow for the existence of a Universe that originated from no source, no creator, no god.

Thus, I fear there will always be people who claim to have sought for God, but in the deep recesses of their hearts did not want to find him.  They may not even know that they did not want to find him; they might claim that they absolutely wanted to find him.  The problem, it seems, is in our difficulty letting go of what we want God to be, when we go searching for him.  We want to be able to craft him in our imaginations, to make him a god who loves us in a tolerant and indulgent way, who agrees with our assessment of what is good or bad, who allows us to live in any way we wish, who would never ask us to do anything hard, or to give anything up.   You will not find him if that is what you are searching for, because that is not what he is like.  He has better things for us than the earthy pleasures we crave.  If we demand that he be a vehicle to provide us with ease in the material world, rather than an unimaginable grace who lifts us above this world altogether, we will not find him.

And yet, for those who long to know God, who know that there is a justice and a righteousness that exists outside of themselves and far exceeds any justice or righteousness they could ever attain in their own strength, who weep over the wrongs of this poor, broken world and find themselves hoping--despite the apparent futility of hope--that all will someday be made right . . .

for those who recognizing that a significant part of what needs righting 

is our own defective hearts . . . 

to these, God will reveal himself with infinite grace.

God will reveal himself to those who seek him, if we seek him in truth and humility, willing to surrender in worship to the only one who is all wise, all powerful and all good.