Birthday Flowers

A few days before my birthday, a card arrived in the mail from my mother. I opened it up, and found inside a gift card to go buy flowers.

But there was a catch!

I was not allowed to keep any of the flowers for myself. No, the present to me from my mother was the collection of smiles I would receive from people to whom I gave the flowers I bought.

The store offered big bunches of roses, and for the sale price I was able to purchase four. Four. I'm not sure I've ever felt so rich as when I went through check-out with such an arm-full of flowers.

At home, I got out all the little vases I could find, especially the ones I wouldn't mind parting with. Fourteen or fifteen small bouquets later, I was ready for my mission.



First smiles were the company who came over for dinner and took flowers with them home. Next, a former co-worker, and after that some grandparently folks. Then a former teacher and his wife, and a great aunt and a great uncle.

What lovely visits we had! I couldn't remember having a nicer reason to go visiting, or a better present than the gift giving, and of happy hours with dear friends.

Next day, I took bouquets to the offices and bookstore in our building, but still, I had a few bouquets remaining. A few dried heads took a ride in the USPS, but there were still quite a few left. How could I justify keeping what hadn't been given to me? I needed to find a way to gather at least one more smile.

Like a flash of brilliance, it came to me: I could dry all the remaining flowers, and collect the last smile from my mother herself. And that's just what I did, too.

Health of Body and Soul

"Nothing tends more to promote health of body and of soul than does a spirit of gratitude and praise. It is a positive duty to resist melancholy, discontented thoughts and feelings--as much a duty as it is to pray. If we are heaven-bound, how can we go as a band of mourners, groaning and complaining all along the way to our Father's house?" The Ministry of Healing, p251

"No tongue can express, no finite mind can conceive, the blessing that results from appreciating the goodness and love of God." The Ministry of Healing, p253

...fixing their minds upon cheerful things...

A riveting paragraph from my morning reading...

"We are in a world of suffering. Difficulty, trial, and sorrow await us all along the way to the heavenly home. But there are many who make life's burdens doubly heavy by continually anticipating trouble. If they meet with adversity or disappointment, they think that everything is going to ruin, that theirs is the hardest lot of all, that they are surely coming to want. Thus they bring wretchedness upon themselves, and cast a shadow upon all around them. Life itself becomes a burden to them. But it need not be thus. It will cost a determined effort to change the current of their thought. But the change can be made. Their happiness, both for this life and for the life to come, depends upon their fixing their minds upon cheerful things. Let them look away from the dark picture, which is imaginary, to the benefits which God has strewn in their pathway, and beyond these to the unseen and eternal." (The Ministry of Healing, 247-248)

For the Want of a Nail

Here is a poem my grandmother taught my mother, and my mother taught me.

For the want of a nail, the shoe was lost;
For the want of a shoe, the horse was lost;
For the want of a horse, the rider was lost;
For the want of a soldier, the battle was lost;
For the want of the battle, the war was lost,
All for the want of a nail.

The Subtance of Things Hoped For

Her daughters scurry around in a dither, as usual, carrying on up to five separate conversations at the same time--and, they will proudly add, keeping track of every word. I don't even have to be there to know how it will be.



Grammy will quietly find a corner of the table, a chair, spread out her crosswords or just sit quietly watching as two or three out of eight birth control methods that didn't work empty countless lunch-size containers of chocolate pudding, mix the pudding with crumbled Oreo cookies and a gummy worm, and putting it all back in with a (washed) silk flower coming out the top.



Or another day, she'll laugh while seven out of seven remaining fight over which one is Mom's Favorite. Or Daddy's Favorite--and my mom, the perfect number seven, wins this one because, after all, Daddy bought her a scooter (motorcycle?) when he wouldn't let any of the others have one.

She'll happily go along with almost anything, but when she puts her foot down, everyone knows she means business.

Like the time she loaded up the first six kids in the Jeep and took herself out to learn how to drive. Driving lessons hadn't gone so well the first time around, and everyone refused to teach her. (Had she driven into a creek? Or was that another ancestor?) But she wouldn't take no for an answer, and by the time she got back, she could drive that Jeep like nobody's business.

She remembered every birthday, every Christmas. The story is that she sent all her children Valentine's cookies every year, but we grandchildren never heard a peep about it. There were at least some among our aunts and uncles who hoarded these famous cookies, and the younger ones didn't get a taste of them until near-adulthood.

Upon moving from one of my childhood homes, I sent her a picture of what it looked like out my window, asking her to paint it for me. She had taken painting classes, I think, several times through the years. She granted my request, and it still sits in my bedroom today, the view looking just like I remember it used to, with every pine tree and every branch as it always was.

Then she had problems with her wrists, got too weak to paint, even to write letters. Ah, those letters....

"It's raining rain today," she'd begin, and continue on with all the news and little acrobatic stick men illustrating the events of the day.

But I got the call this week--hospice took over, she's hardly awake during the day, and we're not sure how long it will be...

A visit now, while she sleeps the days away and hardly wakes for breakfast, would barely yield a few moments for us to connect. And since there's quite a distance between us and the traveling complicated, I've already seen her for the last time.

It was in the fall, and I had flown down for a weekend, just a short time with just the two of us, mostly. We went to church together, ate together, visited with the aunts and uncles together. I saw her in the middle of the night, light shining over her perfect up-right posture as she read her Bible until she could go back to sleep, faith unshakable.

That's what she would want my faith to be right now, while we all begin to miss her--utterly unshakable, the substance of things hoped for, the certainty of things not yet seen.

Climbing the Ladder

I stand at the top, gazing at the landscape from the height of the monster I've just climbed.


I start these things easily, remembering with the first few steps that I am, sometimes, afraid of heights.


Breathe deeply. Don't stop. Look at the next step. Don't focus on how far you have left to go--let that be peripheral while you focus on the details of the moment. Then at the top, see how far you've come.


It takes work to conquer the fear. Is the top worth the price? Absolutely, and I come down the same way I got up: one steady step at a time.

Only Connect

I wake up in this city I called home for twenty years, and after morning prayer and reading, after breakfast, after all the familiar morning routines in an unfamiliar house, I dash to the car and turn the key.

It feels a little like getting my driver's license after the second try, and setting out for the dentist's office--the dentist I had been seeing for a decade already, whose office I could picture in my mind but not for the life of me find from the driver's seat.

Yes, lost (again) in familiar territory.

I know the roads I want, I know the roads I'm on. How to make them somehow connect, to get from one set to the other? I can't recall for sure.

I do recall my mother as I pass the freeway entrance I want with no (legal) way to get to it. New to this same town two decades ago, she took that entrance and ended up driving "as fast as she could in the wrong direction."

We laughed then, wondering how our mother could be that silly. I laugh now, realizing I'm that silly, just like her, and having known the town for a long time, I find less excuse for my sillyness than she could claim. Far less excuse.

But I drive on, thinking that the same thing often happens in our faith. We know the roads themselves, but perhaps we don't always know how the roads connect with each other--we know parts of the Bible, but not how to connect them; we know how to pray in the morning, but not how to pray continually throughout the day or how to let our morning Bible reading encourage us in the stress of the day; we know how to surrender in one moment, but not in the next.

We know where we want to go, but not how to get there from where we are.

Or perhaps we travel a road that seems familiar all the way, yet we aren't sure why this road, above all others, is the one we need to be on. Still, we trust that our Father in heaven knows the plans He has for us, that He will give us wisdom in making all the connections we need to grow in faith.