I mentioned the other day that I had not marked anything on Page 72 of Don’t Waste Your Life, the John Piper book I am reading that I don’t remember reading except that I made a dog ear on that page.
It turns out that I did indeed take a pen to that book a couple of pages later. In fact, I underlined one sentence in red. I very rarely reach for a red pen.
“Any thing but a denial of the truth.” It’s part of a John Bunyan quote about whether it’s ever appropriate for Christians to retreat rather than take a stand for their faith. Bunyan’s point was that it’s OK to choose not to risk life or limb for a variety of reasons — “Any thing but a denial of the truth.”
And then about 10 pages later, I brought out the red pen again: “It is the will of God that we be uncertain about how life on this earth will turn out for us. And therefore it is the will of the Lord that we take risks for the cause of God.”
So we stand our ground on the truth of who Christ is, as we approach the annual observance of how he paid the price for refusing to deny the truth of who he is.
Part of that truth, of course, is referring to Jesus Christ in the present tense.
The dog ear and the underlined sentences are messages from my past self, left for a time when their full meaning would resonate for my present-day self.
Today marks the beginning of my 74th trip around the sun. This past year has been as eventful as ever. This will be my second birthday shared with Mary, who herself is embarking on her (mumble, mumble)th season.
I have had a mixed relationship with March 22 in recent years. I have always been tickled to share my birthday with William “James T. Kirk” Shatner, sportscaster Bob Costas, and Werner “Colonel Klink” Klemperer, not to mention (looks it up) Reese Witherspoon, J.J. Watt, Stephen Sondheim, Andrew Lloyd Webber, James Patterson, M. Emmet Walsh, Marcel Marceau and Chico Marx.
But then five years ago the date was ruined, forever I thought, by the death of Willow The Best Dog There Is™ on my 68th birthday. I knew my birthday would never be the same, now that it was a marker of my best canine friend’s departure more than my own arrival.
Sure enough, the next three March 22s were somber days, especially after the even deeper loss of my beloved Red, who had been my partner for close to 26 years. Nothing, it seemed, would restore any sense of happiness to my natal anniversary.
Then a sweet woman offered me a hug one fateful Sunday morning. A week or so later, during coffee after church, I happened to mention to a friend that my birthday is March 22. A voice popped up behind me, “Why, my birthday is March 22!” It was the sweet woman who had hugged me. We talked about what a fun coincidence that was, and it was another thing that led to other things that soon caused our fellow parishioners to start calling us “you two lovebirds.”
And so the reputation of March 22 is redeemed in my eyes. That one year is sealed as my worst birthday ever — God forbid there ever be a worse one — but I’ve discovered it is still possible to have a happy birthday after all, especially since now it’s a celebration of the woman who hugged me back to life.
I think I bought Don’t Waste Your Life by John Piper in part because of the bonus DVD, which is still tucked in an unopened sleeve in the back of the book. I have been tracking all of the books I’ve read since 1994, and although this book has been on my shelf since shortly after it was published in 2003, it does not show up in my “Books Read” file. (I only record books I have finished.)
The dog ear on Page 72 is evidence that I started to read it somewhere along the way and made it nearly halfway through, and something on that page resonated with me. I didn’t write anything on the page, so it could have been something under the heading on top of the page — “Pain and Pleasure As Ways to Make Much of Christ” — or further down — “How We Handle Loss Shows Us Who Our Treasure Is” — or even that section over on Page 73 — “Wasting Life by Running From Pain.”
Piper is a Minneapolis-based preacher and one of a handful of authors who find their way into my pastor friend’s sermons from time to time. The first time he mentioned Piper, I may have thought, “Hey, I think I have a book by that guy,” and after much rinsing and repeating, I finally reached up and pulled it down. Of course it has been worth the effort.
The dog ear is two-thirds of the way through Chapter 4 of 10, “Magnifying Christ Through Pain and Death,” which reaches into Paul’s letters to make the point that how we die defines us as much as how we live.
“The way we die reveals the worth of Christ in our hearts,” Piper writes. “Christ is magnified in my death when I am satisfied with him in my dying — when I experience death as gain because I gain him.”
I’ll always remember a story from the funeral of a friend’s 13-year-old son who was dying of cancer. They sat down with their pastor to break the news that there was nothing more the doctors could do; he would be gone in a few days. The young man flashed a huge grin and teased the clergyman, “I’m going to meet Jesus before you do!”
I am in no hurry to die by any means, but when the time comes I hope I will face it by pointing people to Christ. Of course, every big change carries a little fear of the unknown, and death is the biggest change since we emerged from the womb, but I also trust God. As the plaque on my kitchen wall says, “I trust the next chapter because I know the author.”
The forecast is for spring. With last weekend’s snowfall measured in feet, the weather people are predicting high temps in the mid 30s to upper 40s for the foreseeable future. The storm of April 2018 haunts us with the guarantee that it still could snow, but not before this snowfall does quite a bit of melting over the next 10 days.
And so it seems a grand time to throw a spring equinox. We hereby declare that the sun must stay above the horizon longer each day than below for the next six months.
May chlorophyll-green invade and conquer the land. May the sun yield sunflowers and coneflowers and wildflowers beyond our ability to count. May birds nest and fledglings fly and children run and dirty their knees. May the land burst with bounty enough to keep our bellies full through the next season of winter, months from now.
Let bandshells in town parks everywhere sprout music of all shapes and sizes. The music of spring and summer is joy joy joy to the world — let heaven and nature sing!
I look across the yard and into the woods and see gray and white. The only color is from the lawn chairs, and even there you could not sit without brushing away a cushion of cold, wet white. But last Saturday, before the storm, a fresh green glow was starting to emerge from the ground, and no doubt it waits beneath the snow and will be even greener after it quenches its thirst on the spring melt.
“Yeah, right, it sure looks like the first day of spring,” leers the cynic. But he can’t deny the truth: It is, indeed, the first day of spring. We survived another winter, and the season of light is upon us.
My iPhone tells me I took 5,906 steps on Wednesday, the first time in a very long time that I reached my informal goal of putting one foot in front of the other 5,000 times a day. It’s a modest goal indeed, as apparently a healthy goal is double that, but even then I am averaging fewer than 4,000 steps, for shame for shame.
The work of recovering from the big snowstorm continues, and it wasn’t until 10 p.m. that I could pause long enough to scribble in my journal and consider what to leave in this space for Thursday morning. I labored over my words for awhile, trying to be profound and encouraging and the like.
But then I looked at the Ray Bradbury quote I saved off a meme a few days ago: “The only good writing is intuitive writing. It would be a big bore if you knew where it was going. It has to be exciting, instantaneous, and it has to be a surprise. Then it all comes blurting out and it’s beautiful.”
And so I said to myself, “Self, set the journal aside, pick up the laptop and see where it takes us.” And here we are.
Bradbury was talking about fiction, of course, of letting your imagination take the wheel and plunging into the story to make it up as you go. Maybe that’s why my novels have all stalled halfway through — I have a pretty good idea where they are going, and I’m trying to fit the story to reach those endpoints.
What if — what if — I just jettisoned the ending I have in mind and see where the story flows from where I left off? What if I’m stalled because the story doesn’t want to go where I want it to go?
And look, I’m fighting myself already. “I thought you wanted to talk about the aftermath of the storm or say something to encourage folks who are going through storms of their own,” my self-editor is telling me. “And here you are writing about writing fiction.”
It turns out that riding the storm out was the easy part. Wednesday morning I drove my space heaters up to Mary’s place because her furnace chose this moment to go on the fritz, and the repair guy hopes to get the replacement part by Friday at the latest. I couldn’t stay long because I have a system at my own home that has been malfunctioning since about the time the storm ended.
I was feeling cozy and smug — you may remember — about how modern life is somewhat miraculous because we can sit at the window watching the worst storm of our lifetime as if it was a fun reality TV show. It has taken me a few days to realize that even in modern times there’s work to be done after the storm subsides, because of what it leaves in its wake.
The days after the snow stopped and the wind died down have proved to be far more challenging than waiting for the storm to pass. Hence, 5,906 steps on Wednesday or about double the distance I walked mid-storm. Who knew?
If the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, what begins with 5,906 steps? Could be quite a trip ahead.
(And now the photo of Dejah and Summer watching the sun set after the storm, which I chose when I was planning to be profound and encouraging, doesn’t really go with what I ended up writing. What the heck, it’s a cute picture. I’m using it anyway.)
I discovered Firefly at the perfect time — late 2004, two years after the Fox TV network mishandled the brilliant science-fiction series, canceling it after only 11 of its 14 wonderful episodes were aired.
The show gained a significant following after it was released on DVD, gaining enough of a fan base to convince Universal to greenlight a movie that answered some questions and tied up some loose ends. That was when I found the show — about four months before the film, Serenity, came out.
I had time to binge-watch those episodes several times after falling head over heels the first time through. As I recall, I watched three episodes the first night, three episodes the second night, and eight episodes the third night. I concluded it was the best TV show I’ve ever seen, and I haven’t changed that opinion in 22 years.
And so I watched with interest earlier this month as Nathan “Malcolm Reynolds” Fillion released a series of videos in which he approached the other seven living stars of the show with the message: “It’s time.” “We’re doing this.” “I can’t do this without you.”
And I was distracted from the worst snowstorm of my lifetime by Sunday’s announcement that the eight original cast members are lending their voices to an animated revival of Firefly, which apparently will be set in the time between the last TV episode and the movie, which is good because two main characters die in the film.
Animation makes sense because all of the actors have gone on to other projects, including ongoing TV series, and also because, well, they’re all 24 years older than they were back then. Their voices are the same, but their faces mo longer look like they did between the last TV episode and the movie.
Everything is lined up to launch the cartoon except a network or streaming service to carry it. Fillion is shopping it around, and there’s a lot of enthusiasm from the fans. The last few nights I’ve been rewatching some of my favorite episodes — “Out of Gas,” “Ariel,” “Objects in Space” — and confirming that it’s still my all-time favorite TV show.
There’s always a chance that they won’t recapture the magic and the new stories won’t ring as true as the old ones. Perhaps some of the magic came from the mystique of being canceled with so many stories left untold.
Still, it will be a treat to see these beloved characters interacting in that rickety old spaceship again. I was in a movie theater for the first showing of Serenity, and (Lord willing) I will be in front of the TV set when the Firefly animated series premieres.
And now I have lived through the second and third biggest snowstorms ever recorded in these parts, and I can safely say they were the biggest and second biggest in any of our lifetimes. When the snow stopped falling and the sun came out Monday afternoon (and the wind did not quit until well into the night), 33 inches of accumulation had been measured in Sturgeon Bay and 26 inches in Green Bay — I am located exactly between those fine cities. In recorded history only the Great Blizzard of 1888 left more snow in its wake.
If you have to endure a monster snowstorm, it may as well be a historic one. This way I can tell future young whippersnappers, “I remember back in ’26, the snow and the wind got so wild they had to pull the snowplows off the road.” Yep, it was that awful on Monday morning. By sunset, though, we could actually see the sun in the sky as it went down.
About 1,200 homes did lose power in the storm, but summer windstorms have taken the electricity from tens of thousands in the past, so most of us have much to be grateful for now that we’re through the storm and into cleanup mode.
As if perhaps to remind me not to be glib about reaching the other side, I did have a couple of sump pump issues that kept me busy Monday afternoon and evening and may or may not be solved — I’ll know more by dawn’s early light.
Clearly I needed a reminder that two and a half feet of snow and bitter cold can wreak havoc with our cleverly designed devices like homes and roads and such.
God has granted us a few days above freezing to start melting this mess, but not until Wednesday. One day with a high of 20 and two nights in single digits will be more in line with the Wisconsin tradition that winter rarely departs until after the first day of spring, and then some.
