The Memory Tree

As we approach Epiphany (celebrating the wise men’s visit to Jesus described in Matthew 2), the traditional Christmas celebration for the eastern church, I wanted to reflect on the importance of a Christmas tree in our home.

This year we motored to Freddies instead of our favorite tree farm to get our tree. We found one, and it has been in our garage and then front room for a week. Yesterday I had to get it decorated because Jaxon, our grandson was coming to spend the afternoon.

So, I got out the boxes and decorations in my famous grinchly attitude. First the lights (only the colored strings worked enough this year, and since this is our year to not have family at Christmas, it didn't really matter?). Then the decorations.

That was when the memories came flooding back. We've accumulate quite a collection of decorations over 42 Christmases. Each one brought back a time, a place, or a person.

There were the decorations Carol hand painted for our second Christmas (only one of the toy soldiers made from TP rolls for our first Christmas together still languishes in a box). We couldn't afford much.

Then I broke out the original Grant nativity set--with figures about 1 inch high. How our kids loved that manger scene, even though it says more about our financial condition at that time (or my inherent stinginess) than our love for Jesus and His birth.

There were
• 3 Baby's first Christmas decorations, 73, 79 and 82.
• Countless treble and bass clefs, musical notes, bells, and pianos from Carols' piano students over the years.
• Plastic, stained glass appearing decorations from long ago friends
• Tiny wire and glass ornaments from friends
• Picture ornaments from each of our grandchildren
• Tiny flip-flops and palm trees from our Thanksgiving vacation in Maui
• Many angels
• Kewpie doll ornaments from my mother for our oldest
• Picture ornaments each of our children made in elementary school
• A ferry for our son's hobby
• A tiny Starbucks cup
• Knitted Santa Claus faces
• Bells made by national Christians in South America-

And, at the top of the tree, the angel our oldest made in Kindergarten, looking down over 42 years of memories.

It was a great experience that made me thankful for all those who have contributed to our Memory Tree over the year. What a special surprise that removed all the Grinch from my attitude and started Christmas for me.

Buttering to the Edges

“Dave, why do you never butter the toast to the edges?” I remember my older brother asking that morning long ago. It wasn’t, “Thanks for making my breakfast.” Or, “I see you are saving butter.” No, my brother was challenging my innate stinginess. I was saving butter by only buttering the center, and leaving the edges dry. You see, I grew up poor. The child of parents who lived through the Great Depression, who eked out a living around spinal fusions and working in the fields, I was part of a family that always worked but never seemed to feel like we had enough. Oh, I don’t remember being hungry. We had great fun. It was just that I learned to be conservative on everything…which is a nice way to say that I learned to be stingy. I perfected this into a lifestyle so much that one friend once said, “Faith is believing in what you can’t see. I do believe that Dave Grant does have a wallet!”

Lately, I realize that I’ve been selectively stingy. I am generous in some areas, but stingy in others. God taught me to be generous in giving through the discipline of tithing (with remarkable results). God taught me to be generous beyond the tithe by asking Him for more to give (called a Faith Promise). I’ve been overgenerous with my time, particularly when it came to work. I would “butter” my schedule to the edges, planning appointments for every hour, with barely time between meetings and appointments for a breath. I actually planned no margins in a day. And, except for cancellations or “no shows”, I would have had no time for taking care of the work generated by those meetings. My image of my early marriage was of me running across the church parking lot, dragging my wife and children bumping on the pavement behind me. Or, as I often said, I would “outrun my headlights.” I’d go so fast that I ran into things before I saw them. “Buttering” my life to the edges produced a pressured, grumpy spirit in me and robbed my family of a cheerful father and husband.

As I confessed, I’ve been selectively stingy. While “buttering” my schedule to the edges, I would be stingy with myself or figure out the tip to the exact penny so as to pinch every penny possible. However, God convinced me that He is generous and that He wants me to be like Him. So, I’ve been working on changing from stingy to generous. I try to recognize those who serve me with a tip beyond the perfunctory 15%. I try to say “good work” to those I see going out of their way. I linger after the previous customer leaves to thank the clerk who had comforted the child instead of making a big deal out of the broken glass. Just yesterday God gave us an appliance we needed to replace. Now I have an opportunity to pass on generosity. In fact, I’m hearing God’s voice about several ways to butter the toast to the edges.

The Key

In the John Bunyan's classic book, Pilgrim's Progress, Christian and Hopeful had wandered from the way to the Celestial City and found themselves prisoners in the Dungeon of Doubting Castle. Giant Despair had captured, assaulted and beaten them, trying to get them to end it all. Suddenly, Christian realized that all along he had the key in his possession that would open the door of the dungeon and get them out. It was the key of….
Promise!

From Spurgeon--God has said Heb. 13:5—God’s Word is a sword…hang on to it. Fear will fall victim to the wound inflicted from the arrow of God’s promises! Troubles are light and momentary when we hide ourselves under “God has said”. There may be a promise in God’s word that exactly fits your situation, but if you do not know it, you will miss the comfort it could bring. …you may be like a prisoner in a dungeon with a key chain full of keys, knowing one of the keys would unlock the door and bring you freedom.
Neglecting to look for the key will keep you a prisoner.

Look for the key!

It's a Sawmill Evening

There is something about the quick glance at the red horizon in the NW, with the last remnants of the day peeking over the hills against the clear indigo skies and the stars beginning to break through behind me that carries me back. It is 1965. I’m just leaving my brother’s house and heading to work the graveyard shift at the saw mill. It’s been a hot day, but the cool of the evening is refreshing, and the last embers of the day redden the sky above the hills. I’m living in God’s provision for my education.

There is something about our recent visit to the Methow Valley that took me back to my childhood valley. The wet spring had left a tinge of green on the brown hills. I’m taken back to standing at the head of the Grand Ronde Valley, near one of my childhood homes, and looking toward the hills. There are only 2 weeks in June where they have a tinge of green. By the time the Elgin Roundup hit, the summer sun had baked them a nice golden brown. This summer, standing on the hills high above the Methow, I’m standing on the hill of my youth.

There are mornings when I’m up early, and the angle of the shadows from the sun shining through the neighbor’s trees, the chirp of the waking birds, and the stillness takes me back to heading to the bean fields as a child. Or, when it is drizzling a June drizzle, and the clouds are doing their ghost rider thing against the hills, I’m on my way to the berry patch. Or, perhaps the shadows take me to a stump in a grove of firs on British Columbia's Thetis Island…a stump in 1966. I was there, meeting with God for grace to handle another day with active First Nation Junior Highers.

This morning as I jogged by the golf course, my mind took me to Kennewick in ’69…when I lived on the Schlagel farm and worked as an intern youth pastor at a local church. The cool of the morning against the coming summer heat took me back to playing a round of par 3 golf beside the Columbia before even the groundskeepers were there …playing alone, because it was cheap (actually free if you started early enough).

Sounds, sunsets, green hills, all trigger memories in me…memories of past provision, past experiences. They make me thankful for those whose lives intersected with mine…parents, brothers, pastors, generous farmers, all God’s gifts to me.

The other day, after we had watched our grandson for several hours, our daughter texted us that she had asked her son to share something for which he was thankful before he went to bed. His little 22 month face looked up and immediately, unprompted, he said, “Nanna and Grampa!” That will melt a grandparent’s heart!

It’s nice to be God’s provision for someone! I’m thankful for those who were His provision for me.

Quieted by Singing!

Recently I had one of those grandparent moments that melted my heart. Our grandson had taken a really good nap…2 plus hours. However, when he awoke, he was just the opposite of how he had gone to sleep. How can you put down an angel and somehow they change character when they wake up?!! He was not a happy camper when he awoke. He cried inconsolably. Wailing!

So, I tried our normal routine. When he wakes up, I pick him up (getting more difficult now that he is nearly 22 months old), sit down in the rocker, take a blankee and rock him. Even this didn’t help. So, I tried my secret weapon. I started singing.

I am famous for my singing ability. Or, maybe it is infamous. I remember in my freshman year of high school when I suggested to the Bible Club leadership that I could sing a solo for club. They said, “Dave, you don’t sing!” I still have emotional bruises in my side where our son placed his elbows when he was a teenager in church and I was belting out one of the songs. And, our youngest once awoke in a fear-filled night, and I started singing “His sheep am I.” After a few bars, she said, “OK, Dad. You can go back to sleep!”

So, you can imagine my amazement as I launched into “Lavender’s blue, dilly dilly, Lavender’s green” and the little guy in my arms instantly went quiet. At last, someone appreciates my singing! It can even calm a tearful grandchild. Or, maybe it was silent amazement on his part about what he was hearing. Maybe I scared the child into stillness?

Whichever, it does remind me that God sings to us… ZEP 3:17 The LORD your God is with you, he is mighty to save. He will take great delight in you, he will quiet you with his love, he will rejoice over you with singing."

And, his song can quiet our grumpies…if we listen well.

On Moles, Trojan Horses, and Sleeper Cells

Sometimes we are put in a situation for one purpose. We are planted like a “mole” for a specific task. We go along through life uneventfully, doing our routine, being faithful to our task, and then, like a Trojan horse virus on a computer, God activates us for the task. This is not to say that what we do everyday is not significant. It is. Everything we do for God is potentially significant, impacting things beyond what we can see. But, sometimes, we find ourselves in places where we have the opportunity to save the day. This happened once to Paul’s nephew in Acts 23. We don’t even know his name. We don’t know what he was doing there. But, somehow, he became aware that 40 men who wanted Paul dead were planning to manipulate the system to get Paul on a path where they could overpower his guards and assassinate him. We don’t know how old Paul’s nephew was, but he was old enough to know that his uncle was in serious trouble. So, he went to the prison and told Paul. Paul sent him to the Centurion in command, who, aware of the danger, whisked Paul away to safety in Caesarea under heavy military guard.

This is the only mention of Paul’s nephew in the Bible. He was strategically placed and had one significant thing to do…and he did it faithfully. Like a “mole”, or a “sleeper cell”, when the time was right, when the opportunity came, he acted. It is not difficult to conclude that God has placed us as “moles” in the lives of those around us. We never know when our opportunity will come, we seldom know our strategic importance in someone’s life, but our word, our sentence, our hug, our action might just be significant for them. What we say or do might just make a difference for them.

This is why Carol always leaves a note to the maid along with the good news in written form in every motel room we use…along with a tip. You never know when it will make a difference in someone’s life. This is why some people smile at every clerk or waitress who serves them. You never know when your smile will encourage. This is why I like to carry my family story, THE FOUR STORMS in written form. You never know when it will be significant for someone you meet. While landing in Kansas City a few years ago on a ministry trip, I leaned across the empty seat beside me and re-engaged the man I had met earlier. He was just awakening from his nap. I offered him something I had written about a difficult experience in our family. Taking it, he put it in his briefcase. Then I asked him how I could pray for him (he knew I was a pastor, so it wasn’t too weird to follow God’s Spirit and ask this question). His answer made me realize why I was traveling to Chicago that day. His family was experiencing the same pain our family had experienced. I don’t know what significance my story had for him. But, when God pulled back the curtain and let me peak into his life, I realized that, even though we had self-selected our seating on that Southwest flight, Someone else had strategically planted me.

Be aware. You just might be a “mole” for Jesus!

The Person in Our Picture

We have this Mary Englebreit tear off calendar on our kitchen table. It has Mary Englebreit’s pictures and quotes for each weekday and weekend. It was a particularly difficult and gloomy day in my house. We were sitting at the table pretty much dealing with sickness and despair. I was looking at the picture you see here, of a little girl planting a garden, and suddenly saw something that wasn’t in the picture. Can you see someone in the picture that isn’t in the picture?

No, the little girl is not alone in her garden. The fruitfulness of her plantings and cultivations are not just from her efforts alone. There is someone you can’t see in the picture who is in the picture. Someone else is involved in helping her flowers bloom.

You can’t see the person, but you do see just the nozzle on the watering can, watering the plants behind her.

There is someone in the picture you can’t see; the child is not alone. And, neither are we. There is Someone just outside our sight who is holding the watering can of our lives and making fruitful our efforts.

“You are near, Oh Lord, and all your commands are true.” Psalm 119:151

And, that is faith—believing in the Person you can’t see, but Whose work (water) you can see! And, sometimes, you aren’t even aware of the water…you just see the results!