Neighborly task gone awry

Your neighbors go out of town, and what happens?  Do you take care of their dog?  Maybe water their plants?  We’ve been recipient of neighborly kindness when friends feed our cats.  Recently, though, we had a different request come our way.  A neighbor asked us to help with his rent house.  As he had moved away years ago, he now had tenants getting ready to leave.  He estimated 30 minutes for us to conduct their exit walk-through.  Several days later, he apologized for the process taking much longer than 30 minutes.  And the task was still unfinished.  Due to problems with some walls and part of the ceiling inside the house, the final transfer of garage door openers and house keys had become complicated.  Our neighbor said, “Sorry for being such a pain.”  We knew he truly felt bad for the inconvenience.  But the occasion became blessed opportunity to explain our motivation for wanting to help.  Matthew 19:19 says to love your neighbor as yourself.  Managing properties long-distance isn’t easy.  If we were in his shoes, we could use the help.  Little did we know in the beginning how this walk-through would be opportunity to live out our Christianity.  Something so small became occasion to share the Bible.  And somewhere in all of this I've smiled to remember that VeggieTales tune:  “When you love your neighbor, loving means lending a hand.”  Those fun Veggies look up toward the music playing overhead to try to figure out where the song is coming from (I chuckle as they somehow hold things with their arms and hands that don't exist.)  I love how God works.

Along a Certain Road

Think for a minute:  Who is your favorite person to call?  Who do you celebrate with?  Who listens when you cry deep?  This week I studied the word call in Greek, particularly the verb used in John 10:3, which says, “. . . He calls his own sheep by name and leads them out.”  My dictionary offered a new tinge on the word PHONEO, which is the verb in this particular verse, saying that it implies a pleasure in the calling of each individual name.  It’s not a dutiful calling in anger like “Go clean your room!”  Neither is it a calling to reprimand for having done harm.  Here it is the sounding of a call that’s spoken with delight.  Sometimes I try to imagine hearing the Lord utter my name, and then I realize I have heard Him speak it already.  He has garnered my attention and conveyed different messages for different tasks, yet I don’t remember His pronunciation of the English spelling of L-i-n-d-a.  He understands my English when I pray, yet certainly at His disposal are ways for calling me outside the English language.  The point here is that He takes pleasure in calling us, and however it is that He pronounces our names, we can hear and choose to listen with pleasure as well.  In work, and in rest, and in intrigue and wonder, I worship Him in my decision to follow.  Today I share with you a video I created upon the Lord’s prompting.  I hope it testifies to the blessings of wanting to make my desires secondary to His.  He calls us to travel along His certain road, and I pray you know first-hand the blessings of letting Him lead.  Click Along a Certain Road or search it on YouTube.

Into heaven, my gracious friend

Today I celebrate.  Today I love the life of my friend who battled an ailing liver.  Again and again I look at her photo in my kitchen and replay her video on the computer, and I catch myself standing motionless for long moments, relishing all the memories.  I remember days of studying the Bible in our houses, and I still have handwritten notes from the day we studied at Chick-fil-A.  I remember the time she read over the mic at the coffeehouse a story she wrote, and I remember she loved the tortilla soup at the Mexican restaurant down the street.  I remember driving her to the infusion clinic and sitting with her and being so happy that she could enjoy Cracker Barrel on the way home.  When she needed the coziness of her favorite blankets, we prayed at her house.  Among her many rooms in the hospital, we prayed too, though sometimes her medications caused her to fade, but I still held her hand.  She traveled the hospital from the regular rooms to the wound care area, to the telemetry section, and to the many different floors that I don’t remember exactly.  So outwardly grateful she was for her doctors and nurses, and she entertained the thought of gathering her hospital friends for a cookout and a time of music and worship one day, once they would all be home.  After enduring a terribly persistent infection one time, she told me how the Lord gave an amazing peace that led her through, and so I took some pointy party hats to her room for us to celebrate.  More recently, her faint voice could hardly convey over the phone.  My last hospital visit, she was not in her room, so on her bed tray I left a card with a picture of a cat that looked like her black-and-white Ziggy.  Since she passed on Sunday morning, I have cried in joy for having known such a wonderful witness for the Lord.  She had hoped for a liver transplant that never happened.  Yet now she is free from pain.  The Lord has wiped all the tears from her eyes, and she dwells with Him now in a new way.  Revelation 21 speaks of heaven and the Holy City of gold, where there will be no darkness because the Lord’s glory will shine always.  All will be new.  My sweet friend now experiences eternally the grandest party of all, and I thank the Lord for sharing His sweet child and inspiring me through her.

As the Video Turns

Is it dangerous to tell a story without having finished the book?  Yes, maybe. Could the plot change toward the end? Certainly yes. Yet today I attest to the thrill of knowing the Lord in the moment. However the story pans out, I account here for the joy He gives along the way. Last week, a couple of things happened that caught my attention. First, I sensed the Lord shedding some light on a video idea. On Tuesday it seemed the video text was starting to take form, at least enough to begin a Windows Movie Maker file. On Wednesday, as I played a new tune on the piano, I realized with a giddy glee that this tune would fit nicely as background for the video.  These were two occasions I considered answers to prayer, for as this video idea had recurred for months, I had wondered and prayed about the particulars of it.  All the more intriguing is the fact that I had found this tune called “Hungarian Song” at a library book sale just last month.  The tune sits on page 26 of a little book by John W. Schaum, which was probably unsuspecting to many, given an absence of bright colors on the cover that dons a mere 25-cent price sticker from Half Price Books.  Still this plain little book held such immense thrill for me.  Put together the developing video text and the fun piano piece, add the family Christmas video I’d made the previous day that set me in the mode for producing videos again, add my husband into the picture for the Lord nudging him to delve into the software for recording the piano part, and suddenly this video that had been nondescript for months was now taking shape.  And I don’t pretend to know how the video will finish, yet I hereby testify with great excitement as to how the Lord leads us along a path and fills in the blanks for what He calls into being.  Really the lineage of all this reaches even further back into the summer when the Lord connected me with a young friend whose love for classical music was my reason for looking for music books at the library sale in the first place.  Also the Lord used my family to suggest we drive to the book sale, and He used an occasion with church one year ago to prompt me into teaching piano at home, which thereby caused me to realize my lack of classical piano music, as most of my classical pieces had been for oboe.  On an even larger scale, actually our whole lives the Lord is connecting people and events all around us.  And I pray we always find thrill in knowing His presence.