March 30, 2010

Dear Readers,
A couple of weeks ago my wife, Dianne, shared with me a story she read from the daily Lenten email devotions from Goshen College. The story was so good, I wanted to share it more widely. I might even use it in my Easter sermon this Sunday. I hope it adds brightness to your day.
By Carolyn Schrock-Shenk, associate professor of peace, justice and conflict studies at Goshen College
I felt the heaviness of the room envelope me as I walked through the glass double doors, the security guard locking them behind me. It was 4 p.m. and I was the last person allowed into the local Social Security office. The waiting room was still full; two long, silent rows of people; faces etched with anxiety, fear and sadness; gloom wrapping them about like a shroud. This was the recession personified.
Almost immediately, my name was called and I moved forward to claim the appointment I had made three weeks before. A woman, perhaps in her mid-fifties, greeted me, then pulled up my “case” on her computer screen. She turned to me expectantly. With anxiety tripping up my words, I began to describe why we couldn’t possibly owe large amount of (alleged) overpaid disability benefits from years before.

She listened carefully, jotted a few notes, then pulled up more data on her screen. I waited, not knowing, trying to intuit what would come next.

I was astonished by what did come next. In the space of a few minutes and without an ounce of judgment, she replaced my anxiety with peace of mind. She understood why I was anxious, she said, but the next part of the process was hers to worry about. It was her job, in these next weeks, to figure out what happened and why; then she would work with me to decide how to address it. She promised to work with me until the end of the process. “It will be okay,” she said simply. “You don’t need to worry.”

I stared at her, almost undone by her compassion. Feeling an immense sense of relief, I asked her, “How can you be like this, working with sad and difficult stories every day, all day long?”
Her eyes brightened and she leaned toward me as if sharing a secret. “I love my work,” she said, with passion. “At the end of every day I go home and know that I made a difference for at least one person that day. What could be better?”

I was deeply moved; the power of her spirit transformed mine. If the people in the outer room embodied the distress of the recession, the woman in this cubical embodied the promise of abundance.

“Besides,” she then added, with a grin, “They don’t pay me nearly enough to be mean and grumpy.”

March Blog

Again it has been over a month since I have made a blog entry. In that month, spring has sprung, at least according to the calendar. Actually today being cold and rainy doesn’t seem much like spring. But we did experience spring and actually a little summer on our recent week long trip to California. Since last summer, we have planned to visit our son Phil and his wife Mary who are seminary students at Fresno, California. We first flew into San Jose where Phil and Mary picked us up and we drove to the seaside city of Monterey. It was there we saw the ocean for the first time on this trip. The next day we took the famous 17 mile drive in Carmel which goes through the world class Pebble Beach golf course. Along this drive and down the coast on California Highway 1, we observed God’s power and creative handiwork in the crashing of the white waves against the rocks. We also saw sea otters playing in the foamy water and elephant seals sleeping lazily on beach.


As I have written in earlier blogs, I am much more of a mountain person than a beach person, and this trip had both in abundance. We spent a day in Yosemite National Park as well as a day in Sequoia National Park. The waterfalls in Yosemite were louder and fuller than normal due to much melting snow. God’s grandeur and majesty were evident in the falls as well as the peaks and the huge Sequoyah trees over a thousand years old.

It was an amazing trip, just what I needed. The sun shone brightly each day with temperatures in Fresno between 70 and 80 degrees. Next week I hopefully will put a few pictures in a blog so you all can enjoy some of God’s wonderful creation with me. But I will need a little assistance to do that from Charlene, my administrative assistant here at the church, who knows how to do that.

Once again I was reminded of Psalm 95 in which the Psalmist sees the greatness of God in the mountain peaks and the sea, the depths of the earth and the dry land.

1 Come, let us sing for joy to the LORD;
let us shout aloud to the Rock of our salvation.
2 Let us come before him with thanksgiving
and extol him with music and song.
3 For the LORD is the great God,
the great King above all gods.
4 In his hand are the depths of the earth,
and the mountain peaks belong to him.
5 The sea is his, for he made it,
and his hands formed the dry land.
6 Come, let us bow down in worship,
let us kneel before the LORD our Maker;
7 for he is our God
and we are the people of his pasture,
the flock under his care. (Psalm 95:1-7)

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