Here’s what I want you to do: Find a quiet, secluded place so that you won’t be tempted to role play before God. There, simply and honestly as you can manage, pray. The focus will shift from you to God, and you will begin to feel His grace.

That’s all I have to say this morning! Use your own translation, but read Christ’s words about making a show of your religiousness.

We’ve all heard that phrase either in admonition or in a criticism of pundits who invoke half truths or outright misinformation, but we need to remember the rest of Alexander Pope’s advice to really appreciate his sage advice.

Here is the poet’s words: “A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian Spring. There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain, and drinking deeply sobers us again!

In other words, the more we know about a subject, the less arrogant we will be. Listen to those who drink deeply of the subject’s information. I am the first to admit I know nothing about virus pandemics.

Never in my wildest dream would I believe that my life’s fundamental, foremost thought on my mind would be to make sure I had enough toilet paper in my house! You’d seen the bare selves, pictures of people holding up huge packages of toilet paper over their heads, smiling the triumphant smile of a victor.

I remember telling a friend when this all began that I didn’t have but eleven rolls of toilet paper, so this had to end before then! This is a bit “tongue in cheek”and I am not so obsessed as I say, but I do think it says a great deal about reality and getting everyone thinking about what we really need in life.

My heart breaks with lines of cars waiting for food for hours and getting there to find the source had run out of food, while produce farmers are plowing in vegetables or dairy farmers pouring milk down the drain as schools and restaurants are closed and don’t need it. Is there a better way to get need and source to fill that need together??

I hope that when this crisis ends, that those basic needs and the people who have provided those needs are appreciated and honored for who and what we really have to have to make this life sustainable. Food, shelter, health care, faith, friendships, family, some meaningful work to benefit others and ourselves, and a bit of toilet paper, are what we need. Thanks be to God!

In Sunday School our class is using Adam Hamilton’s series, The Walk, and learning what it means to walk with Jesus. Some very simple disciplines of study, Bible reading, and being loving and acknowledging those who walk with us. Sunday, as we thought of things we could do, we reminisced about how a simple word or two could be so important to all of us.

Earlier this week, before I vowed to limit my social interaction, I went to Walmart to pick up some over the counter health item. I usually go there before I walk at 6:30 in the morning…..and right in the middle of them stocking the shelves. As I maneuvered down one isle, the girl stocking shelves had to stop to let me roll by. I smiled at her and asked her pardon for being so early, continued on my way. A bit later, I felt a tap on my back, there she stood. “Here, you need to use this when you get home” she said. Handing me a bottle of 70% of Isopropyl alcohol.

Not an earth shaking moment, but the smiles on both our faces said “ we both are going to have a good day today.”

Last Saturday my house was filled to the rafters with the joy, enthusiasm and vitality by 30 or more women who had come back to celebrate an era and a facility that housed their joy, tears, and efforts for many years. They were the players and coaches of JMU’s Women’s Basketball program. The fact that our daughter, Betsy, was a member of that group made it even more special.

Now what does all that have to do with SuperTuesday? As I prepared to go vote, the faces and presence of these successful, confident, benevolent women crossed my mind. They have faced a world where their government has never ratified an Equal Rights Amendment, passed by Congress in 1972, but blocked by conservative states from being ratified by 2/3 of the states legislators. Keep kicking the can down the road!! So they face a marketplace of their skills knowing they will only make 3/4’s of what men make for the same job.

So, I never vote in any election that I don’t think of my Mother who marched for women’s right to vote in 1918. My promise to these young women is that I will never vote for a candidate in any election who does not support women’s rights in all aspects of their lives. Go vote,

Some of you know that I moved from a wonderful duplex I was renting into a wonderful neighboring development where I purchased a duplex. Terrifying thoughts of “moving” rivaled excitement of new, pleasing surrounding kept me a bit tense, as my daughters can affirm, but the results are more than comfortable and verge on the edge of spectacular

On moving day, six daughters, three sons -in- law, two grandchildren and a somewhat be-fuddled older woman (me) measured and nailed, moved and placed, wiped and dried, threw away and kept the collection of 80+ years of stuff. At the end of the day, everything was in its intended spot.

One chair in particular, placed just right, gave me the joy of telling the daughters that it cannot in the future be moved. In the lower panel of one of the living area windows, acting almost as a frame, the view is picture perfect of the hill that holds Bill’s dream of our house on the hill. And on a clear day, with bare trees surrounding it, I catch a glimpse of the white boards of that dream still fresh and giving shelter to new generations. Life is good

Boy, can we use some joy about now in this world.  I recall sitting around the piano at Sprinkle House on Madison campus singing one of the Kingston Trio’s hits of the late 1950’s. …….words went something like this.  “ They’re rioting in Africa,,they’re starving in Spain.  There’s hurricanes in Florida, and Texas needs rain. The whole world  is festering with unhappy souls, the French hate the Germans, the Germans hate the Poles.  Italians hate Yugoslavs, South  Africa hates the Dutch, and I don’t  like anybody very much”.   Change the nations and the year could be 2019.

Let’s take a recess from that.  Let’s find a different focus on what is truly important.  Right now I’m getting dressed to go to Sunday School and teach some great people how God’s gift to us came to the simple people first.  Not Rome or Kings but to an insignificant priest of the temple and his wife Elizabeth, and to a lowly teen with beautiful angel visits and their thankful songs of serving God in whatever capacity asked.      Can we do less?    Merry Christmas

Our Church sign reads,”Gratitude is Contagious!”  Which not only caught my eye, but set me to thinking about the truth of that statement.  How in the world do we get that attitude, and can we catch it from others?  Oh, I hope so, and in many ways, I know so.

My basic source of such an opinion is my own experiences as a child in a house that embraced the whole concept gratefulness—-grateful for life’s essentials, grateful for relationships, grateful for life itself.

There are certain images that are burned into my conscience that in many ways govern my own attitude.  One image is my Dad saying grace before every meal…not Mom, for some reason, but Dad.   I don’t remember the words, but the simple action of this great big, kind, benevolent man pausing to give thanks for sustenance, probably “contaminated” or rather fostered my own life of being grateful.

I remember, if we were still bustling around getting a meal on the table, or perhaps he was eating alone, he quite often bowed his head and said grace silently…we saw his lips moving, so we knew he was praying.  This led one neighbor to ask of a farm helper who ate with us, “Is Charlie still talking to his plate?”  Charlie wasn’t talking to his plate!!

In these somewhat puzzling days of uncertainty and words spoken with malice, and we find it hard to find that gratefulness, I hope we have a history to fall back on, or someone that will infect our spirits with gratitude.

I find myself reflecting upon the many times that my children taught me valuable lessons when they were children, and certainly one of those times came to the forefront with my last musing about children speaking out.

Hearing a mother recount a happening the other week about how her daughter had interacted with a peer with condemnation for what the peer was doing, was related in a way to me that, although the child did speak out about unacceptable behavior, the manner was a bit harsh and un-bending.  The mother seemed all right with that, and I found myself thinking perhaps another approach would have been better.

I immediately thought of an incident in our home that paralleled her story almost exactly.  I received Susan’s permission to use her story in this way and to confirm that my recollections were correct.  On the school bus, when Susan was about 10 0r 12, a neighborhood boy was doing or saying things that were completely inappropriate, so Susan called him to task vehemently, in not too kind words.  When she related her tale to me, she said, that I said, “Susan, I think you were wrong in the way you handled this.  You probably embarrassed  him in front of his peers.”  I didn’t tell her how to fix  it.

Without telling me, she walked to his house a mile or two away and apologized to him for the way she talked to him, only telling me she had done this when she got back.  I asked her what his reaction was and she said, “Oh, he and his sister, my age, stayed and played awhile.”   I have been proud of Susan many, many times in her life, but never more proud of her than that moment in her childhood when she acted as adults should act.

I don’t know what happened to that young man later in his life, but I know what that mature response did for my daughter.  It wasn’t me making her do something that must have been hard for her, but the fact that she did it.  I saw this benevolent spirit played out many times in Susan’s life–whether in the school system for troubled children, or in the various courts of law seeing that people were treated justly.

Let the children speak!!

Last night in our small group meeting we were looking at the Resistance Stories of the Bible as Rachel Held Evans tells them with wisdom and beauty.  Recalling times when people were brave and empowered enough to dare speak up about injustices, sinfulness, and how God’s plan for their lives was much different than what they were experiencing.

We know how prophet’s rallying cries echoed across history,  but we were drawn to the stories of the young.  Whether a shepherd boy with slingshot, or three young men dancing in a fiery furnace, or a young Queen calling to task King Xerxes for his debauchery and treatment of women, the young have many times led us to a better place in the world.

So it was a foregone conclusion that we would pay  heed to the words of Sweden’s Greta Thunberg when she walked into the United Nations and facing the leaders of the world she said, “Shame On You!”  And shame on all of us who watch with anxious breath as the world’s weather gets crazier and crazier with scientific proof of the cause, we cling to our conveniences of plastic everything, throwing it casually away for our grandchildren to deal with one day!!

Let the children speak.  We just might learn something.