There's No Place Like It... Finale

It's hard to finish any journey.  Somewhere at the end, around the last turn when your heart starts shading towards home, you know that time is limited and you squeeze every last ounce of energy into the moment trying to remember every last little bit so that you can pull it out of the mnemonic dresser drawer in the not two distant future.

My friend, Ben, came to visit in the middle of the last week.  He lives in Montana with his wife and son.  As a dentist, Ben sees all sorts of people throughout his days; but rarely does he get to see people that are actually glad to see him.  As Jesus once said, 'No one goes to the doctor unless they are sick," well, no one goes to the dentist unless it's an absolute necessity.  And then it's usually too late.  It probably would do Ben no good to say, "Why didn't you come earlier?" because inevitably, they would create a melodramatic story of woe, but in reality, people just don't think about their teeth being that important.  Until they see the movie Castaway, that is.  I still have nightmares about the self-realized orthodontic surgery with an ice skate.  Anyway, I was happy to see Ben.  He's not my dentist.  He's got really nice teeth.

We spent Thursday hanging out at my parents' house.  I felt like I was a teenager again bringing friends over to the house, playing cards until midnight, you know, things you do when you're younger.  Now I'm lucky if I can make it to ten o'clock, but during my trip I think I was up until at least midnight every night. 

In seminary, Ben, who was my next door neighbor, two other seminarians and myself would get together at Ben's apartment every Monday night and play Settlers of Catan and then multiple games of Pinochle.  Very competitive people playing games.  Hmmm.  Good times.

Ben and I drove to visit one of those seminarians, Dave, who is now a pastor in a town about twenty-five minutes from my parents.  As we drove, Ben and I settled into conversations of old - like putting on a comfortable shoe and when we reunited with Dave, the clocks turned back.  Perhaps you've all felt that before whether hearing the voice of an old friend, recognizing the handwriting (what's that) of someone you haven't seen for a while or even catching a whiff of perfume which returns you to a previous point in time when life seemed, well, probably less complicated. 

Time with Ben was short - kind of like time with everyone else.  And when he left on the Saturday morning, it was kind of like a quick, brief dream - of the ilk when you have a nap.  Good friends are the ones that never seem to change no matter distance or time.

We traveled to my grandparent's house on the Saturday.  They were celebrating their 65th wedding anniversary.  I don't know what the percentage of marriages that make it to that point but it has to be infinitesimal.  Just like the 60th, it was a celebration of life together.  My grandfather just turned 90 and my grandmother 83.  As we approached their house, the same one they've been living in for multiple decades, I had to smile.  Amazing how a trip to the grandparents brings back an amazing nostalgia for a different age, when I was little and my parents hair contained no gray.  My grandparents both had cat's eye glasses and worked the small grocery store/butcher up town in Frederika.  One of my fondest memories of visiting them when I was younger was the opportunity to pick any kind of candy from their store when we left.  I always chose grape Hubba Bubba bubble gum.  I wish we still had that. 

As the day wore on, after the never ending photo shoot which seemingly takes far too long for most family reunions, I noticed something different about Grandpa and Grandma.  I'd never seen them look so content.  As friends and family streamed past them, shaking hands with them, giving them cares of congratulations, eating the buffet meal, they seemed incredibly grateful that life had brought them together for this long.  Sixty-five years.  It's hard to even imagine, isn't it?  Even though my grandfather has prostate cancer and my grandmother has various maladies including an aching back and foot problems, they stood straighter and happier than I'd seen them in a long time (even though I hadn't seen them in a long time).  It was a beautiful thing. 

Life together that long has to have a certain amount of hereditary luck.  You have to have good genes, an excellent awareness of what is safe and what is fun, a good sense of humor, surround yourself with people who care about you and then enjoy the ride. 

The next day, at the baptism, my grandpa had brought along his visual journey of life - his photo album.  Incredible photos from the early 20th century; cars, clothes, hairstyles all foreign to me.  The people in them looked alternatively happy and stoic depending on the picture and if they were in church or not.  As we looked through the pictures, I asked my grandpa what his favorite time in life was.

He looked at me through his bifocaled glasses, watery eyes gazing at me with amusement.  "I don't know if I should tell you this," he said as he rifled through the pages to some photos from the 1940's.  Pointing to a page, my grandfather showed me himself in his army uniform.  "Those," he said, "were probably the best days of my life."

No slam against family time or any time spent with Grandma, but he enjoyed being a young man - carefree with his friends.  And now as he paged through the photos of that album, almost everyone in the black and white pictures had passed on.  With a sigh he closed the album and looked at Grandma and smiled.  He was content.

If only we could all be like that.

So my journey closed.  Connecting with family; revisiting long lost memories of childhood, early adulthood and young family life, I made my way with great pleasure to the airport thinking of my own family here in Australia who was waiting patiently for me. 

I hope I get sixty-five years. 

Thanks to all the people who made my trip an extraordinary one.  Especially those who housed, fed and drove me around.  To my parents; thanks for the first 40 years.  To my siblings and spouses; thanks for a great time in Canada; to my grandparents; thanks for all the years of fun; to my friends in the States particularly Ben, David, the Dianchuns, Gorski's, Welk's for organization of church fun; the church family in Rake, Uncle Tom, all my Aunts and Uncles, cousins and spouses who I got to reconnect with in Frederika.

Thank God for life.

I'll get back to regular writing.  I hope I hear from you all, too.

There's No Place Like It... part 7

                               Reid and Lucius for you disbelievers



Since I've returned to Australia, a few people have asked me if I ever felt like staying back in the United States.  For most people, to live on the other side of the planet might fill them with trepidation; the fear of being without Cheetos might paralyze them.  To be without Walmart, unthinkable.  What I've found out about myself through this last trip is that I am neither filled with trepidation nor do I particularly need to live near a Walmart.  Even while sliding through all the old haunts reliving good memories, I never had the thought, "Gee, I really think we should be living here still."  That's not to say my heartstrings weren't pulled a few times, but for the most part, the return home was quite amazingly selfish.  Indulge to explain, if you will.

Chapter 12 of Hebrews begins poignantly: "Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that so easily hinders and the sin that so easily entangles, and let us run with perseverance the race marked out before us." 

Are we ever fully aware of the people who think about us?  Do we know how many people, whether two doors down or two continents away, are praying for us?  Can we be completely cognizant that somewhere on the race marked out before us, there is a full complement of people who recognize how we have been important in each other's lives?  If Paul writes to the a group of Jewish Christians who are despairing and who want to return to the old way, and he says that they are surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses - those who have gone before and those who support from a distance - then Paul is writing to me, not in my despair, but encouragement in the race.  And it is not a great cloud of witnesses: what I found in returning to the United States for almost three weeks is that I am surrounded by a cumulonimbus of witnesses.  These witnesses, ones who have seen and are willing to proclaim the good news, were an absolute blessing in those weeks.

I had an great drive from Canada with my younger sister, Danielle, and her family.  She's an amazing young woman and although already thirty-something years old, she's filled with a wisdom beyond her years.  I'm not just saying this to butter her up, but a few years ago, when we lived in Rockford, she went into the hospital to have back surgery and ended up with spinal meningitis.  What a nice blessing.  She persevered through the ordeal; but any time you come close to your own mortality, you begin, I think, to reflect on what are the most important things in life.  It was evident that in her marriage, in her role as wife and mother and in her vocation as a nurse that life is precious.  It was a great twelve hour ride from Canada to my parents house.  It's not often that we are locked into the same space (very small space) with your relatives.  I wish it happened more often.

Then, Uncle Tom picked me up in his new car.  It surprised me because Uncle Tom doesn't very often buy new cars.  He drives the one he has until it almost falls apart.  And he takes such good care of them, that he'll drive them for decades happily watching all the newer models go floating down the highway while he merrily whistles his way along the road in his 1988 Buick.  Uncle Tom was my driver's education instructor also.  (I didn't call him 'Uncle Tom' in that class).  We chatted for a while talking about crops, his new car which did not have a speck of dust in it, and like a good, former driver's ed. instructor, he stuck right to the speed limit spending the appropriate amount of time looking left and right and intersections.  Because the asphalt road to my parents was blocked off, I suggested we take gravel.  He laughed.  We drove ten miles out of the way. 

It's alright.  We had more time to talk.  Uncle Tom is a bachelor who lives with his brother.  Two excellent fellows - both former coaches - who farm together.  My brother and I used to work for them and as we drove along the road, we began the journey back to the late 80's and early 90's.  As he drove, Tom brushed his thin gray hair across the front of his head.  I noticed that he had a few more lines around his eyes and the trip back through the decades was really good for both of us.  Perhaps we don't take as much time to reflect as we should. 

The next day, I took off for Rockford which was our home before we left for Australia.  Sometimes it's easy to go home, sometimes it's hard. 

It was hard to go to Rockford.  It was hard to see all the friends we made, not because things had changed, but because things hadn't.  As I reinserted myself back into a former life, it felt as if I'd never left.  I stayed the first night with one of my best friends in the world, Dave, and his family.  We used to watch football games together, drinking whiskey and talking about theology until midnight.  Sometimes Christine used to wonder where I was.  I don't think she wondered that often.  As we sat and talked, it felt strange to be staying because normally I would walk two blocks home to my house. 

Whoever is reading this (if anyone at all) think for a moment about your favorite place you've ever lived.  Take a moment to remember the greatest of memories from that place.  Then, imagine your disappointment when you walk past that place and find that it is inhabited by five families, two dogs, two cats and is obviously devoid of a lawn mower.  Surreptitiously I looked over the fence of the backyard careful not to disturb any of the 'drug lords' (that's what my former neighbor Merv thinks they are) and I took a few photos of the backyard.  My favorite tree, in all its majestic greenness stood in the middle soaking up the early morning rays of sunshine.  I was happy to see that the new tenants hadn't been able to remove all the remnants of our time there.  There were an abundance of pumpkin plants with their tumult of large, prickly leaves splaying across the backyard.  That made me happy.

I turned away from our old house quite happy to have the memories and quite content not to look at the windows which were now covered with large, black army blankets.  I did meet up with Merv and Ruth, though.  They took me out for lunch.

Merv is in his mid 70's and Ruth is probably younger than he, but he calls her his 'Old Lady.'  Merv is a perfectionist.  His lawn, garden and house are immaculate.  I think when he used to look at our house, he probably thought we were bringing down property values, that's why I would sometimes come home from work and find him on top of my house blowing the leaves out of the gutters or mowing my front yard.  They were amazing.  They are amazing.  They are the neighbors that I wish everyone could experience.  We used to spend some afternoons, after work, sitting on their back porch enjoying life.  Merv would bring me an Old Milwaukee beer - which is the kind of beer that usually only college students drink - and we would talk for lengths of time about anything at all.  Merv and Ruth were some of the most giving and caring people I've ever met.  They even took our girls with them to their cabin one time.  I wish we had Merv and Ruth's next to us here.

After church, I went to Walmart.  I had to stock up on some things; buy an iPad (much cheaper in the States) and then I found about forty movies that I wanted to buy.  There they lay in all their glory in the five dollar bin.  Five Dollars!  I forgot about that!  So, for about two hours I sorted through the complexities of the Hollywood entertainment industry selecting Nacho Libre instead of Caddyshack.  I brought all of my purchases to the counter, selected the iPad and iPod that we needed.  I watched the long-haired Walmart employee amusedly run my selections up.  As he gave me the total, I pulled out my credit card.  Over his thick glasses he said, "I'm sorry, but your card has been refused." 

"That's impossible.  It just worked yesterday."

"That's what it says."

"Can you keep all this stuff for me until I get it sorted out?  Just one day?" 

"I'm sorry.  Company policy says that I can keep it through the night, but that's it."

"But I just flew in from Australia.  Can't you tell by my accent?"  That didn't really work.  He looked at me as if I was trying to rip off the world's largest superstores and he shoveled my almost possessions into a plastic yellow bag.  I just wasted two hours of precious time and I had to get to a party.

I left the store in a huff and after stopping at my friends, the Dianchuns (that's not really how you spell their name, but I get it wrong every time so I just spell it phonetically), to sort out the credit card, I quickly drove back to Walmart. 

He's such a liar.  They'd already put all my belongings back and I didn't have time to re-find them.  Oh well, off to the party.

There are metaphorical pictures that I carry in my metaphorical wallet of people whose faces remind me of how life is precious.  Two of them are Bill and Sue Gorski.  Bill is the CEO of a hospital in Rockford and Sue is the CEO of their house.  They threw a bar-b-q for all the people we used to sing and work with at the church.  For a few moments, as the sun was going down over their back porch I sat and watched them.  They are like a great duet, like Stevie Wonder and Paul McCartney singing 'Ebony and Ivory."  They move in such elegant rhythm and even as they approach their mid-60's (while still looking like mid-40's) that they could be the poster children for how God blesses marriages.  As the crew from our Crosswalk service ate, shared laughter and simply reminisced, it was a heart-tugging moment of wishing for the 'old days.'

"I wish we could come back," I said at the end of the night after everyone else had left.

With Bill's arm around her, Sue looked at me behind a smattering of summer freckles on her cheeks.  "We wish you could be here too."  And then she paused and started again, "But we know why you've gone.  When you show us what your family is doing, we know why God called you away.  We may not like it, but we understand it now."

And then it hit me again.  With all the people I was remembering, I'd forgotten how much life was behind us already.  We so often get caught up in the present, or worrying about the future, we forget the ones we left behind.  And believe you me, they are still praying.  As I met with more and more people, the light continued to shine brightly.  There is a race marked out before us - one that God has purposefully and wonderfully designed.  There are hills and sharp cliffs, dangerous moments - but there are also sparkling oases of watering holes.  And just like on a running course, the people that are offering the water are the ones giving the most encouragement.  Whether family or friends, neighbors or church family, we stand together as one.  Whether they know it or not, I am continuing to pray for them, by name.

Thanks for sticking with me through this narrative.  Maybe you'll take a few moments to flip through the photos of your metaphorical wallet.  Maybe you'll remember the amazing moments you've spent with incredible people and life will be brighter for a few minutes.  Maybe then you'll face forward again to the race marked out and start running again.

There's No Place Like It... part 6

Sometimes I dream about being a hero.  You know, showing up at the nick of time, saving some person, or better yet, a mob of people in distress.  Somehow I can slow time down to move Matrix-like faster than a bullet to defend them from an ill-fated injustice.  Then, I'm slapped in the face with the reality of the situation that I have no cape, no alter ego, and definitely no superpowers.  Take, for instance, my return to Australia.

My flight from Dallas left at 10:30 p.m.  As we lifted above the clouds for the last time over the United States I looked through a brown haze at the Dallas City lights disgusted by the amount of smog that we breathe in constantly without even knowing it.  I wish I had the super sucking power where I could take a deep breath and inhale all the air pollution in the world and eject it into space.  Super sucking power.  That's funny.  When I play basketball, I think I do have that superpower.

So anyway... (that's how my Grandma Matthias makes a transition to a new thought.  I like it)... I had sixteen hours and five minutes dream about the reunion between my family and me.  As I attempted to crane my neck to fall asleep for some of those hours, I manipulated my conscious dream to something like this:  Christine and the girls stood at the sliding doors from customs, posterboards in hand proclaiming, "Welcome home, Daddy.  You're the most amazing human being in the world.  We're so lucky to have you."  Christine would drop everything she had, purse, camera, phone and rush to me past security guards, throw herself into my arms, lock her legs around my waist and give me the deepest kiss the world has ever known.  I would stand there like a hero, thick, muscular legs firmly planted in the ground accepting my wife's embraces feeling the adoring gazes of my young daughters welcoming their conquering hero home.

That's how I fell asleep probably somewhere over Las Vegas.

My real dreams circled and swirled around the previous two weeks.  Fishing was an amazing experience, but one of the most profound things I've ever encountered occurred on a Wednesday afternoon. 

The sun sinks later in the northern hemisphere in late July.  Casting a sprinkled frosting over the small rivulets, the sun showed us the direction to our late afternoon fishing opportunity.  We'd stopped at the cabin; after a hard day of fighting Esox, we enjoyed a libation and a few games of horseshoes with the relatives.  Then, with calm water beckoning, Vikki and journeyed down to the boat, giant fishing net in hand to head out for a few more hours of trolling for bass.  Vikki's eyes looked alive; perhaps it was the fact that she gotten more sleep in two days then she probably had in eight months.

Vikki and her husband, Cliff, were blessed with their second daughter in January.  Jovie was born almost three months premature:  two pounds two ounces and when the pictures came through of her tiny little body, it was with amazement that we pondered the wonder of medical science.  But it was a miracle of God that Jovie was born at all.  I truly mean that; there are certain people that find miracles everywhere, but I tend to be a little more miracle-selective.  Jovie is a miracle and the more people that I tell her story, the more they agree.

In December, I got a phone call from my brother.  A real live phone call from America, not Skype, or text but the phone rang with a  number from Nebraska.  My brother had called to tell me that Vikki had gone to the hospital because her waters had broken.  Because Vikki wasn't due until April, the doctors (as the story was relayed to me) told her that she was going to lose the baby and that she should prepare for that eventuality.  As Vikki later retold the story, she said she could feel Jovie still moving; the horror of Jovie's struggle was unimaginable.  With little sensitivity, the doctor said that when the waters break, the baby loses her home and because Jovie was only twenty weeks into her development, in medicine's eyes she wasn't a 'viable' birth yet.  The doctor told Vikki and Cliff all sorts of things, none of them particularly positive.  So when my brother called to relay the message he had four words to say.

"It's time to pray."

It was night time when I received the call and I imagined Vikki in the hospital bed, wrecked by the news that her almost forty-year old body couldn't make it up the last hill of pregnancy.  So, as I lay there in bed, I stretched out my hand all the way to the northeast, over the city of Brisbane, across the Pacific Ocean, past Fiji and the Solomon Islands, Hawaii and the western part of the continental United States and I prayed harder than I ever have in my life.  I didn't really know what to pray for because praying that the baby would be born healthy seemed like such a imaginatory figment; so I prayed for Vikki and Cliff that somehow God's love would be shown in their lives.  For fifteen minutes I lay prone on the bed, one arm pointed out the window, and I was sure that there were a lot of other hands stretched out in the direction of Cedar Rapids also.

I don't know how prayer works.  I wish I did so I could get it right every time but it seems like prayer is facilitated when we are not praying for ourselves and our own wants and desires (not that it is wrong) but when we pray for God's power to be shown, you never know what might happen.  It just so happened on that cold December night, the miracle that we only could have hoped for, like looking up just at the right time to see a shooting star, happened.  For some odd reason, Vikki's labor stopped.  When the doctor came in to see her, she was perplexed.  These things just don't happen and even as the waters closed up the doctor tried to get Vikki and Cliff 'to see the reality of the situation' which is doctor speak for 'the baby, even if it makes it, will probably have severe 'difficulties' and we should think about other options also.'  I can only imagine how much this enraged Vikki and she isn't one to give up very easily.  So Vikki laid very still for a few nights but then the hospital had to send her home.  Insurance wouldn't pay for an extended hospital stay until the baby was at least twenty-two weeks. 

For those fourteen days, we waited and stretched out our hands every night hoping against hope and now praying for that 'one percent' chance to be Vikki and Cliff's.  Stillness in Vikki's life... for two weeks... she made it; I don't know how she did it, in constant wonder that if she moved to quickly in a certain way or sneezed too hard or whatever, that Jovie's one percent would turn to no percent.  But she made it.  They went back to the hospital where they were admitted and told the long shot odds.  Every day that she stayed in the hospital without having the baby was one more day that the baby could develop and overcome the odds of the medical world. 

Vikki and Jovie made it six more weeks.  That's forty-two days of idleness, of worry, of boring day time soap operas, of thousands of crosswords, of time away from Vikki and Cliff's oldest daughter, Paisley.  That's forty-two days of sitting still in a sterile room away from her husband and family.  My mother came to stay with the family for much of that time, but it was difficult, I think, for Vikki to be away from home. 

As the weeks passed, the nurses and doctors couldn't fathom how it was happening.  Surely when the baby was born the stress of the prematurity would create problems.

Through the difficulty of Jovie's pre-birth, the world had a chance to prepare for a new story; a new miracle.  Through the courage of the two youngish parents, Jovie was brought into the world albeit very small. 

But now, eight months later, there's a pretty cool little niece making pretty large messes in her diapers.

So Vikki and I were on the boat, listening to the small waves clap hands against the sides of the aluminum boat.  The wind whistled in the birch leaves.  No fish were biting, so I heard Vikki putting down her fishing rod.

"Hey Reid, why do you believe in God?"

I guess I wasn't ready for the question because it's usually a question that strangers ask me, or congregation members, or people that I don't live with who could be easy to escape from.  Families don't often talk about faith.  Why?  I don't know.  That's just the way it's always been.  We don't talk about the important stuff in case we don't get it right.  Or, we don't want to offend the ones we are closest to.  I should be used to the question, but at that moment, I didn't really know the right words to say. 

"I guess I believe because something inside me tells me that I can't understand why the world is the way it is without having a purpose.  I suppose that's kind of avoiding the question, but every time I try to think of the world as just a meaningless orb floating in the middle of space I can't reconcile it with the way I feel about other humans.  Why is there love?  It can't all be evolutionary results, can it?  Why is there caring and hope?  Why is there sunshine and reason?  Why can we think? Why do I have a little voice inside my head that flicks my inner ear when I do the wrong thing?" 

I was blathering on about anything that came to mind but I continued fishing so that I had something to do with my hands. 

"You know, Reid, I didn't pray at all when I was in the hospital.  I couldn't."

"Why not?"  Now I was looking at her.  Vikki's got really cool eyes - greenish, with gold flecks in them, kind of leonine. 

She paused a moment and said one of the most profound things I'd ever heard.  "I didn't want one more reason not to believe in God."

I asked her if I could write this and it seems to me that Jovie's story has to be told, but so does Vikki's.  She'd had a hard ten years up until meeting Cliff, and now that life had turned around, it seemed as if God was working on that family also.

One more reason not to believe in God.  How about that?  That sounds like about ninety percent of the people I meet.  We're all looking for reasons not to believe - me included - because it's just too incredible to believe that there is a God that cares.  And even in the midst of tragedy, because not everyone gets to experience a miracle like Jovie, we find that God sends people to help them in that time of struggle. 

At the end of my time in the United States, Jovie was baptized.  I got to sing a song I wrote (one hour before) at the baptism.  Sometimes the Spirit works quickly.  As I sat on the floor, singing the song, Paisley and Jovie were in the same room. Jovie's intense blue eyes stared at me while I was singing and it felt as if God was staring at me - not that Jovie is God, but that somehow living miracles have a strength in them that we can never understand or begin to comprehend.  I had to look away from her.  But not at the baptism.  She did a good job of messing her pants there too.

My brother Ryan did the baptism; my sister Dani was a sponsor.  A whole world was proud of this youngish family.  It was a beautiful moment in the life of God's family.

I woke up from my sleep on the airplane.  After dreaming about the baptism, we had neared Brisbane.  I had slept on and off for the night intermittently watching movies through bleary eyes.  I turned off the screen when we landed and prepared for my 'hero worship' when I arrived.  Just like the family gazed at Jovie the last weekend, so I was prepared for my own dream to come true:  the girls with their posters, the long loving kiss... you remember.

I grabbed my bags and exited customs at 5:30 in the morning.  I was already wearing the smile on my face.  As the doors opened in front of me, I scanned the crowd. 

No Matthias girls.  No Christine.  Oh well, they were probably held up a little bit.  Or maybe they're hiding.  Greta likes to do that.

Parking my trolley and bags, I stood aside and looked at my iPad.  5:45.  I had no way of contacting Christine to see when she would arrive.  So I waited.  This was not part of the hero dream.  The victorious night always has the damsel arrive right on time.  6:30.  Okay, now I was getting worried.  I was past being bothered that they hadn't showed up on time; now I was beginning to think that Christine was going to get someone else to pick me up.

6:45.  I was looking at sports scores when the doors opened and the girls came rushing in.  They gave me huge hugs and told me they loved me and missed me.  Their posters were in the car, but boy were they tired.  And, they had to get up so early, there was traffic.  My heroic reentry to the country was not perfect, but there was still my lovely wife.  As we pulled the trolley outside, there she was hurriedly adjusting school bags to allow for my two large cases.  She smiled gave me a huge lingering squeeze, a strange look and a peck on the lips.  No large, lingering, wet kiss for this jet lagged traveler. 

We got in the car and began to drive away.  Christine reached into the console.

"Here's a tissue."  I looked in the visor mirror.

I had a large booger hanging from my nose.

What a hero.

There's No Place Like It... part 5

Esox Lucius

My brother once spoke of a mythical fish he named 'Lucius.'  This is one he 'almost' caught; he espied it after his lure, from a distance at sunset, mouth as big as a volleyball.  Like a Yeti or the Easter Bunny, Lucius was spoken of in whispered tones almost always beginning with, "There I was..."  All fisherman have a Lucius, I suspect, whether he swims in the waters under the boat or the torrents of the imagination.  Lucius is the one that got away, the one you almost caught and most almost certainly never will:  In other words, the biggest fish you'll ever see that will cause a change of pants if you ever snag it. 

Esox Lucius is the taxonomic term for the northern pike.  Thus, for my brother and his mythical representations of piscetology (study of fish), Lucius is his dream fish.  The northern pike, otherwise known in some fishing circles as the American pike, common pike, Great Lakes pike, grass pike, snot rocket (because it's an extremely slimy fish), slough shark, snake, slimer, slough snake, gators (due to a head similar in shape to that of an alligator), jack, jackfish, Sharptooth McGraw, Mr. Toothy, is one of the most voracious predators in the cold waters of North America  and Europe.  When we travel to Canada, these are the very fish that we seek, and, thankfully, they aren't really that hard to find.

Esox - from the Celtic word for "Great Fish" and Lucius from, well, I don't really know because Wikipedia didn't give me that information, is a fish of dreams.  Northern pike generally grow to a size between four and twenty pounds (2 and 9 kilograms) and a length between 20 and 44 inches (40 cm and 116 cm).  These fresh water sharks (my terminology) are known for their predatory hunting methods.  They lie in ambush, amidst the weeds, only their tail and gill fins moving gently in the water, until something swims along.  Then, with their tail bent, they unleash a fury of movement explodes (normally) at the surface.  Grabbing their prey sideways with their large back teeth, they flip the fish (or lure) so that it enters the throat headfirst.  Northern pike are not really picky about what they eat (kind of like teenagers).  They've been known to ingest frogs, mice, small ducks, of course small fish, but there are even reports of finding pike which have choked from attempting to swallow another fish of the same size. 

We don't normally hang our feet in the water.

Thus it feels like every time we float out onto the water, there could be an opportunity of a Captain Ahab hooking into Moby Dick.  (I thought about reading the story once.  Just once.)

One bright, sunshiny (not to be confused with a previous use of the word 'sunshine' in another fishing story a couple of years ago), a Wednesday, to be exact, Vikki (my triplet sister) and I went to the boat house to rent a boat for a few days.  It never works to have too many people in the boat; for the most part, people get their lines tangled, the fishing area is too small for those in the middle of the boat, or worse yet, someone, by an errant cast, will get a treble hook through their scalp.  So, we rented a little fourteen foot aluminum craft with twenty horse motor.  Because the motor is disproportionately small to the magnitude of the lake, we knew that we would have to leave half an hour before my brother and Matt in order for us to have any good fishing at all.  Matt and Ryan both had bass boats with growling 100 plus horse power outboard motors.  They can jet across the lake at forty miles per hour, arrive at the fishing holes in minutes whereas Vikki and I would have to monotonously putter, motor whining at us (instead of growling), and take forty-five minutes to arrive.

At the dockhouse, we selected our life jackets and fishing net.  At first the dockboy, Steve, wanted to give us a paltry little walleye net.  I shook my head.  "No, no, Steve," I said with chin crooked between the forefinger and thumb of my right hand.  "We're going to need that one," I said as I pointed at a net that looked as if it could ensnare a small elephant.  I could tell that Steve was laughing at me as if he doubted my fishing skills.  I would show him wrong.  Most assuredly, I would make a believer out of the Doubting Stevie.

"Are you sure you don't need a pickax," Steve replied while his face was turned away, "Sometimes those big fish need a whopping before you try and put them in the boat."

My sarcasm detectors raged.

I took the net from Steve and scurried down to the boat to secure our tackle. 

Fishing rods:  check (three of them, because if I were to catch Lucius, I'd have to bronze the pole where my brother could see it every day of his life)
Net:  check.  It's mesh was catching on the oars, but no matter.  Lucius would not get away.
Lures:  check.  Northern pike will attack anything even a Suick which is an eight inch piece of wood with three treble hooks in it painted in brilliant colors.  Or, fishing spoons - brightly colored lures of all hues.  Northerns attack these like no other.
Life jackets:  Check.  Not that we wear them.  When you battle fish like I catch, a life jacket gets in the way.  The only reason I might wear a life jacket would be if it was too cold.  I still probably wouldn't wear it because then the rest of the males would think I was weak.
Stringer:  check.  It was likely that Lucius wouldn't fit on a stringer, but just in case we caught any fish that were under fifteen pounds, we could bring those home for the family to eat.  That's what Vikki and I do - we're providers.
Coffee:  check.  We'd be out there a long time, not just fishing, but driving the boat back and forth.

I pulled the cord on the engine and it roared to life.  It took a little bit to find the release lever to lower the motor into the water but fortunately Steve was the only one who saw me struggling.  Staring at me with Esox-like eyes, he shook his head.  Vikki hurried down the small hill, past the horseshoes pit, pushing ducks out of the way - on a mission.

"Are we ready?" she asked spitting some of her blonde hair out of her lips. 

"Yup, push us off.  Get in." 

Vikki attempted to push the boat out, but let's be honest; she weighs about a hundred pounds and I've already gained five in two days.  I had to get out.

"Alright," I said, hopping back in the boat, "Now we are ready."

We exited the small lagoon where the boats are moored and thrust our sturdy craft out into the wide blue of Lac de Mille Lacs.  It was a glorious morning; the sun had risen warm - not hot - but a perfect temperature for a ride on the lake.  It was lucky that I was driving because I was wearing the same clothes I had been wearing for three days.  Is it not a fisherman's good luck charm to actually smell as bad as the fish? 

The beauty of the day helped me to ponder how magnificent the Canadian lakes are.  Sometimes it even seems to me that they are windows into God's soul, that somehow, if you look deep enough into them, you could see the beginning of time, the joy of God's hands in the reflection of the sky, the...

"Don't hit the submerged rock," Vikki said as much to herself as me.  We've had problems with rocks who hide just under the surface making mincemeat of engine props.

"I got this," I said confidently, but in reality, since I hadn't been to Canada for a while, I was a little shaky as to the route I was supposed to take.  I didn't let Vikki know this and as it would take us roughly thirty-six hours (or so it seemed) for our fourteen foot boat with twenty-horse motor to get to the fishing hole, I'd have time to adjust course and pretend that I was sensing where the rocks were.

"Just be careful," Vikki stated pushing her chin lower into her sweatshirt to keep her neck from the wind.

We skimmed the waves, bouncing slightly.  The drone of the motor kept us company as we looked around at the amazing scenery; the dotting of islands, the bald eagles circling above, the loons diving here and there when we approached at our rapid pace.  Then, after almost thirty minutes of boating, our fishing hole arrived.  To start the day off we were going to attempt to catch a different type of fish - small mouth bass.  This was a warm up fish, like when my brother-in-law Warwick tries to catch fish.  He cleans out the minnows before I catch all the big ones.  That's what happens with inexperienced fisherman like Warwick.  I feel bad for him.  Such a big man: such little fishing skills.

We saw the white milk bottle floating above the submerged rock.  Small mouth bass love to hover around rocky areas hiding in the crevices waiting for unsuspecting little fish to wander a long.  The traditional way that we catch these smaller fighting fish is to put an earthworm on a jig and pull it behind the boat. 

So, Vikki and I both strapped a jig onto the end of the line without a steel leader which, in the case of northern pike fishing, is extremely important.  A northern of any size, like a mackerel, can cut through the line with its teeth with the greatest of ease.  I released the jig and worm into the water and smiled at my sister.  She was staring up at the blue sky as if it was the most beautiful thing in the world.  I adjusted my cap that already had stains of fish slime and guts on the underside of the bill.  Then, without warning, the end of my pole leapt.

At first, I thought I had snagged a rock, or a branch, but then, with great amusement, I watched and listened to the line ziiiiiiiiing away from me.  Yes.  A small mouth bass.  But then the unthinkable happened.  The line was pulled down.  Into the depths the jig and its little friend mister worm tracked away from us. 

I swallowed hard.  Small mouth bass don't go to the bottom.  We were in twenty feet of water.  There was only one outcome...

Esox Lucius.

"Vikki..."  She already knew as she was staring at the end of my line.  Just one thing you should know about Vikki; she is netaphobic.  Many years ago she must have missed netting a big fish that someone else had on their line and had become overwhelmed with PTND - Post Traumatic Netting Disorder.  When she put the net in the water, she became very nervous - her hands and arms twitched.  She would giggle and laugh out loud not because she was having fun but that's all her nervous system would allow her to do.   

"I know, Reid," she said.  "I can see where this is going."

"Maybe it won't be that big," I said, and as soon as the words escaped my mouth, Lucius went deeper.

"Just shut up.  Shut up.  Shut up,"  she kept murmuring.

"You know," I said, "I'm only using a jig.  There isn't a leader on it.  You'll have to be very careful."

"I KNOW!" she shouted she picked up the net.  "I JUST DON'T WANT TO SEE IT FIRST!"

I think Esox can speak English, because as she exclaimed the sentence, the fish began to surface.  Like Moby Dick, the monster of the deep came with a background track in my head. 

Dunduh...pause... Dunduh....  (cue the strings from Jaws)  Dunduhdunduhdunduh... and then Lucius broke the surface, all 41.3257 inches of him (I should say her because, according to my favorite Wikipedian source, all fish that size are female), all eighteen pounds of muscle made an appearance.  Vikki's gaze drew to my face, the blood drained from her cheeks and she slowly put the net back in the boat. 

"Not gonna do it," she said.  "You're going to have to net it on your own."

"Come on, Vikki, we can do this.  We'll do this thing together."  It sounded like we were going into the birthing ward at the hospital.  "Just breathe slowly.  I'll do all the work, you just have to catch it in that monstrous net."

"Nope.  I'm going home."  PTND hitting blindly at will.

"Vikki, we can do this."  Lucius made another run tearing yard after yard of line from my reel.  Not great timing but I was having a wonderful time fighting him/her.  Lucius came toward us on the surface and if northern pike had dorsal fins, this one would have sunk the Orca.  Now that he/she was surfaceward, we could see the long rows of yellow spots on his/her sides.  The little jig looked like a dust mote in his/her mouth; one swift swing of his/her head and the line would be severed.

"Help me..."

After about fifteen minutes - it felt like thirty seconds - Lucius began to tire and I dragged him/her to the side of the boat.  His/her eyes gazed up balefully.  Making sure that he was ready to go homeward into the net, I towed him along portside until he/she made no movements.

"Alright, Vikki, now put the net into the water... slowly... and I'll drag the fish into it.  Easy as pie."
With shaking hands, Vikki grabbed the net again.  Reaching over the side she put the net into the water.  The mesh billowed out behind it.  It looked big enough to catch at least a small moose in it.

Then, dunduhdunduh, just as I pulled Lucius closer, dunduhdunduhdunduh, his/her mouth closer to the net...

ziiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiinggggggggg. 

Oh, sunshine.  I looked at Vikki.  She was almost apoplectic.  "What did you do?" she shouted.  "I thought this was going to be easy!"

"Sorry, sis."  Lucius seemed like he/she was out for a swim in the park.  After a few more minutes of fighting the large snot rocket, I finally began pulling Lucius back in.  Closer and closer, his yellow spots like warning lights, flashing back and forth in the murky water, he came.  I motioned with my eyes for Vikki to put the net back in the water.  I didn't want to say anything just in case Lucius could in fact understand English.  Hopefully, Lucius was French Canadian.  With the utmost care, I guided the nose of the fish into the trembling net.  The bulk of the fish was carefully ensconced in the net while the last inches of his/her tail still stuck out of the mouth of the net. Vikki hefted Lucius with all of her might into the boat where he flopped listlessly and exhausted on the metal floor of the boat.  When he flipped, it sounded as if someone dropped an anchor on the bottom.  I looked at Vikki.  She stared at me.  We whooped and hollered. 

We caught a big fish.  The two of us.  In a small boat with a small motor.  Vikki took a few pictures.  My smile was as big as a monstrous Esox Lucius.    After the photo session, we took the jig out of Lucius' mouth and put her/him into the water.  As if waving his/her thanks to us, the tail moved him/her into the deep to await the next prey that might swim by.  Both Vikki and I sank back into our seats relieved at our good luck.  Some people fish their whole lives and don't see a fish like that.  It was a good day.

We put our lines back into the water and within a few minutes, both Vikki and I had caught another fish.  I fought with mine for about fifteen seconds, a small northern pike again had attached itself on my line.  Then, all of the sudden...

Snap.

My line broke. 

There is a God.

There's No Place Like It... part 4

I was talking to a farmer this morning after church.  We gather outside the building, in the sun, and share stories from the week, laugh a little bit, complain about politics and the lack of money that seems to be in the world.  As we talked, our discussion moved toward families.  The farmer, Don, said that family doesn't seem to mean as much any more and it is evident in the fact that families get together rarely and then, when they do, all that they can seem to accomplish is fighting. 

Sounds like a church, doesn't it?

We talked about family for a while; they asked me questions about my parents,  grandparents and my siblings.  And I recollected the memories of the last few weeks.  One of the things I most greatly enjoyed was riding with my parents - alone.

Because I was born in a set of triplets, traveling anywhere with your parents - alone - is unheard of.  I'm not sure I can remember a timeframe when I spent that much time talking with them about faith, life, love and all the deepest topics that most families ignore because it's easier that way.  For an hour and a half we drove from Thunder Bay to Lac De Mille Lacs and I was blessed to spend those hours with them (I also got unbroken time with them on the way back from the baptism, but that story will come later).

Lac De Mille Lacs (in English, Lake of a Thousand Lakes) is a large lake by any standards and if it were situated in Australia, it would probably be considered the largest freshwater lake in the country.  Roughly 25 miles across (40 kilometers) it is part of the Great Canadian Shield where the glaciers gouged out the lakes in the upper Midwest and Canada.  Australia, for the most part, has no natural freshwater lakes except in Tasmania.  Most freshwater is retained in dams, or reservoirs, for use in towns and cities. 

Lac De Mille Lacs is almost exclusively used for recreational purposes.  Over the years, there have been a few houses built on the shores, but for the most part all the shoreline around this large lake is completely unadulterated by human housing.  During the winter, though, the lake freezes over and the ice fisherman pull their ice houses onto the lake, the local councils plow the snow, puts up streets signs (on the ice) and even the mail is delivered to the fisherman.  Amazingly, the ice is so thick and hardened that even semi trailers can be driven on it.

There are two main resorts on LDML: Open Bay Lodge and Pine Point Resort.  For the first twenty odd years of the annual pilgrimage to LDML, the family stayed at Open Bay Lodge but now we rent cabins at Pine Point.  I'm not sure we even remember whey we made the change; perhaps it was the fact that the mosquitos were so devastatingly effective at Open Bay in the stillness of the bay, that we trekked to Pine Point which gets the winds from the west.

The gravel road that leads us to the Resort has gone through many transformations over the years.  It used to be like corrugated tractor tire tracks for fifteen miles, 57 turns, loose gravel - it was a death trap especially as we drove through the night without stopping.  Now, the corners have  been straightened, the gravel leveled; we can make the trip in half the time.  But after each corner, we got closer to the beauty of the lake.  The blueness of the sky reflected on the water and the pine trees waving in the reflections.

And then almost magically, it appears, like the drapes being pulled back from the stage which has prepared for a play.  That's what this year felt like - not necessarily a drama, but a staged opportunity where the characters are confined to a small stage.  Just as Shakespeare penned, "All the world's a stage..." and all people play a part of it.  Over the years, my family has developed the roles that they play well.  I'm sure all families have that.  Each family has the quiet one or the clownish one; the talker and the listener, the crazy one and the one who tries to calm everyone down (obviously my family does not have a crazy one).

Family vacations tend to be good drama anyway.  Any time you place a gaggle of people together in close proximity for any length of time, all sorts of discussions and wonderful opportunities present themselves.  Add the fact that we'd be spending large tracts of mornings and nights in the boat - good stuff. 

We entered Pine Point Resort about 10:00 on a Saturday morning.  Excited to get the boat in the water, my parents called in to the office to make sure that our cabin was already set up.  Funny thing, though, as I looked at the prices for things, it was incredible how much everything had grown in cost.  A fishing license used to be twenty-five dollars; I remembered how proud I felt the first time I put a twenty and a five on the counter to gather the small piece of paper that I would keep on my person for the entire week which allow me to have in my possession four walleye, four northern pike, and four smallmouth bass.  I don't know how many times during the week when my dad would try to get me to fish for walleye, which is a traditional type of fishing - throw the worm out on a jig or lure and wait...  I would say, "I didn't fly ten thousand miles to pull fish up off the bottom of the lake without a fight." 

So, I would fish northern pike.  Part 5, hopefully tomorrow, will entail my fishing exploits for the week.  Today, just background.

There's No Place Like It... Part 3

About half an hour from the Canadian border, a look of anxiety crossed my brother's countenance.  His eyes had a pinched look as if he was concentrating too hard on book six inches in front of his face.  There is a worry line that runs vertically near his left eyebrow.  I would know; I've got it too.

"What's the problem, Hermano? (that's Spanish for 'brother' and probably one of seven words I can still remember that can be used appropriately in regular human conversation)"

His hands gripped the black leather of the steering wheel, knuckles beginning to push all the blood out from his hands.  "I'm worried that I'm going to be arrested at the border."

Of all the responses I was going to get, this would have been somewhere on the list between, 'I'm joining the ELCA' and 'I'm pregnant.' 

"Come again," I said, laughing a little because certainly he was joking.  Certainly.

"No, really, I'm afraid that when I show my passport at the border, the Minnesota Border Patrol, will refuse me entry into Canada.  A few months ago I was driving down the road, minding my own business (aren't we always when the red and blue lights start flashing?) when this cop pulls me over.  I remember clearly because I wasn't speeding, well, not that much.  He walks up to my window and I hand over my license and registration.  'Do you know what the problem is?' he says in this deep voice as if somehow I'm going to be scared."

"Were you?" I interjected, because I always get scared that someone will have a vendetta against me and plant some sort of illegal substance in my car that I haven't noticed, like a hundred pound bag of drugs or a dead body, and the cops will take me off in handcuffs and I won't be able to be a pastor anymore. 

Ryan kind of ignored the question.  It's like asking Superman if he's afraid of heights.  "Supposedly my tags were out of date - expired.  The policeman had to take a few moments out of his hectic day catching thieves, drug lords and murderers to make sure that I didn't get away with having expired tags on my 2006 Pacifica that for some reason the insurance company keeps calling a minivan.  It's not a minivan."  My brother has a phobia, I think, of minivans because of all the time we spent in my parents 1988 Ford.  My dad drove that thing for about 200,000 miles until rust had eaten away all the panels and the engine sounded like it ran on skinned cats instead of gasoline.

"The copper told me that I would be getting a warning, oooooh," he made a gesture with his fingers in the air wiggling them back and forth, "which I was happy about, mind you.  He sent me on my merry way telling me to get straight home and fix the priorities in my life.  Change the tags.  It was the only time in my life that I wished I were the pope so I could tell him that he should be careful because I have the power over who gets in and who doesn't."  I nodded.  I've had that feeling before.

"Anyway, I forgot about the warning, because it's a warning, right?  It's like a yellow traffic light.  It doesn't really mean anything.  But a few weeks ago I stumbled across the warning piece of paper and the copper pulled a fast one on me.  It wasn't a warning, it was a real ticket and I had had thirty days to pay the fine or show up in court.  I didn't pay the fine because I thought it was a yellow light and the court day was almost the day I found the ticket."  Ryan went on to tell me the rigamarole he went through where eventually, even the prosecuting attorney, who was probably bored to tears with prosecuting hardened 'criminals' like my car tag avoiding brother, told my brother to 'Shut up,' and he would have the ticket wiped because Ryan did not have a record (as far as I know.  but he does live in Nebraska).

"I saw the secretary erasing the ticket from the court docket, but I don't know for sure.  I didn't pay the fine and if the lawyer didn't really do what he said, I might be..."

Ryan didn't say what his biggest fear was.  It wasn't spending a night in jail or paying an exorbitant fine - LCMS pastors make a lot of money:  a lot - ...

It was that he didn't want to miss out on the weekly trip to Canada.  More than any other family member, my brother loved this annual adventure.  When we were growing up, we used to pretend that the inside of our house was Lac de Mille Lacs and we would pretend we had fishing poles catching fish (1980's ceramic animals or Billy the Bass of singing infamy).  As we fished we made up stories and reminisced old ones from what we could remember from our early childhood years.  We talked about the crispness of the air, the smell of pine trees in everything, the feel of rain pelting our faces as we jumped three foot waves in the boats.  That's part of the Canadian memories we carry around inside of our heads. 

The Canada trip was not just about fishing or spending time together, but it was more about reeling in the years sharing time with family, putting down the screens and mobile devices and listening to the loons proclaim that God's beauty is still vibrantly alive.  All those years we've been going to Canada (we started going in 1978) we've stockpiled family moments that keep us going back and those family moments then buoy the rest of the year, even when we are fearing the threat of being arrested.

Ryan swallowed hard as the border security checked our passports and asked us questions.  No, we didn't have any guns, no tobacco, no live bait, no dirt.  One year when we went up, the BS asked me what I did for a living.  I told him I was a pastor.  He didn't know what that was but he let us go anyway. 

We did have to stop, though.  We had an extra bottle of whiskey.  Had to pay a little extra for that one so that we wouldn't be arrested.

After clearing customs, we drove the rest of the way to Thunder Bay, only about a forty-five minute drive.  We didn't have a clear set of directions to get to the hotel and after a few fumbling attempts, we finally spotted the Days Inn, located my dad's fishing boat and parked.  As we walked inside, I had another sense of knee bucking surreality.  Had it been so long since I'd seen my family?  How would they sound?  What would they look like?  They'd be happy to see me, but would there be awkwardness?

Then the doors of the elevator opened and after two and a half years, my dad walked out of the room, arms extended, whiskey and water in one hand, the other waiting for a hug.  His smile was as big as Lake Superior and the sound of his voice like a Pavaratti aria.  "Frederick."  That's what he calls me.  Nobody knows why, not even Dad.  He gave each one of his kids and grandkids a nickname, but mine was 'Frederick.'  He wrapped me up in his arms careful not to baptize me with Black Velvet and water and any fear of awkwardness was squished out.

Then came Danielle, my sister, or (she'll probably kill me for this) Doo Doo.  When she saw me it was as if her face melted.  I don't know how to describe it any different than that; her eyes melted instantly to tears and she hugged me.  It was a really cool experience to have your family press thirty months of missed hugs into one.  Then Mom.  The re-meeting was all over quickly, but life had been pressed back to normality.  At that point, I was not forty years old, but ten.  Mom and Dad had taken us on the yearly Canadian adventure.  All things were normal.

Except, that is, my dad decided to sleep in the pickup truck because he didn't want anyone stealing his boat.

There's No Place Like it... part 2

Psalm 27:14   "Wait for the LORD; be strong and take heart and wait for the LORD."

Waiting is not a strong point for me. Waiting carries with it the understanding that you are not able to move from the current position because something is coming that you need.  For instance, I can remember a year where Cabbage Patch Dolls were really popular.  My parents happened to get in before the craze really took place (crazy it was because those dolls were the ugliest toys I've ever seen - except for Garbage Pail Kids) but some parents were waiting in line at the store overnight so they could buy one of the misshapen dolls with masses of thick scraggly hair.  If they left the line to go to the bathroom, their waiting would be for naught.  If they didn't wait, they'd miss out. 

I couldn't leave my position at the airport, standing on the curb in Minneapolis.  In the ninety-five degree Fahrenheit heat, I was immobile in waiting for the white Pacifica to arrive.  If I were to move, I might miss my brother and his family.  If I were to move, they might have to make another lap around the highly reconstructioned airport.  If I were to move, I'd probably suffer the wrath of Ryan, which is not really wrath, but more like an uncomfortable silence.  That's how my brother punishes me: small grin on his face, blue eyes staring me down and no words to let me know that, "you should have just stayed put."

But that's neither here nor there because within minutes the car towing a the bass boat pulled up in the left hand lane.  It's incredibly difficult to park the connected car and boat so they just kind of pulled up slowly rolling to a halt. 

In the long line of things that you shouldn't have to wait for, waiting for your brother comes only after the short list of Christmas Eve and the moments after you ask the question, "Will you marry me?"

I threw my suitcases in the boat because there wasn't any room in the back of the car.  Packed to the hilt with kids, kids' entertainment devices, kids' food and kids games, I popped up front with my brother over-the-moon-happy that they were able to pick me up at the airport.  As I hugged him for the first time, it was like squeezing myself.  We still look alike; we still sound alike.  I once told the congregation that when I was lonely for my brother, I would record a message on my own answering machine that said, "Hey bro, this is Ryan.  Just wanted you to know that I miss you." 

We drove about three and a half hours that night telling stories punctuating them with superlatives of the amazingness of life and how fast it goes.  It had been two and a half years since I had seen any of my brothers or sisters - it didn't seem that long.  Where did the time go?  Life is a lot like a tether ball, I think.  When you play tether ball, each person takes a swing at the ball and if you hit it, it wraps around the pole.  As the game begins the ball moves really slowly, but the longer you hit it, it begins to circle faster and faster making the same rounds and eventually it stops after exhausting the energy given it.  Life goes slow when we are younger, smaller and have plenty of energy to expend, but the longer life endures, if we are so blessed, the faster it seems to go even though the minutes and hours stay the same until eventually, when we have expended all the energy given us, we stop.

My brother is the chaplain at Concordia University in Seward Nebraska and my sister-in-law, Sarah, is a doctor in Lincoln.  They make an incredible couple and it is evident to everyone who follows my brothers Facebook page that he adores her like no one else in the world.  We talked about their life together, the vacations that they have done together, their ability to raise excellent kids and by the time we reached Two Harbors, Minnesota, the time seemed to have passed like another thwack of the tetherball. 

When we reached the hotel, our friends Matt and Anji greeted us for the night.  Matt is one of our friends from college who lived on the same floor as Ryan and I.  As I was attempting to escape jet lag, we stayed up until almost midnight sifting through all the old stories and learning all the new ones.    It was going to be a good week.

Lake Superior is, as Thunder Bay's motto states, superior by nature.  Lake Superior is the largest lake in the world with regards to surface area and is the third most voluminous.  It is said that if Lake Superior were drained, it would cover the surface area of both North and South America to a depth of one foot.  I didn't do the statistics; I let Wikipedia do it for me, but it's an interesting fact if it is true.  During storm season, wave heights have been measure up to twenty feet high; some as high as thirty feet. 

It's a cold lake and as we woke up in the morning, kids swirling about the legs of adults.  We sat on the shore of the lake looking out over the vastness of the water.  Three hundred and fifty miles across and one hundred and sixty wide.  Pebbles, warming in the sun, were being tossed about the shore by Matt and Anji's children and I watched them for a while before approaching.  There is something special about kids and the way they interact with the world.  For many of them, there is nothing as enjoyable as simply throwing rocks into the water to watch them splash, or to see how many times they can skip, then watching the effects of the waves ripple out in concentric circles to far off shores.  Kids like to make waves.  Do we ever stop being kids?

Back in North America making waves.  This first stop at Lake Superior was good for me.  It never changes.  My family had been going to the same place in Canada every year; the feeling of anticipation and the presence of patience was overwhelming.  If parting is such sweet sorrow then practicing patience is such sour sorrow.

But then, almost suddenly, I had arrived and the majesty of the lake was before me, its ever present motion does not offer a reflection.  You must keep moving.  So we did.  For breakfast, I ordered some kind of omelet with wild rice.  That in itself is not really important, but it was the accent of the waitress that caught my ear.  It had been a long time since I'd been surrounded by the hardness of the Midwestern American accent; the hard 'r's made me smile.  It was another one of the things that I'd missed and hadn't recognized it; I was the one without an accent.  During my trip a few people would tell me that I was beginning to register an Australian accent.  There is nothing wrong with the Australian twang, but deep inside me, I didn't want others to think my speech was morphing or that I was, if you will, betraying my homeland by gathering a different distinctness in speech.  Perhaps I was overreacting, but I made a conscious effort to sound as American as possible.

Our drive up the 'coast', or shoreline, was decidedly uneventful.  The kids played their games; the adults told about theirs and soon we were at Gooseberry State Falls hiking area.  We disembarked from the cars, stretched our legs, filled water bottles and headed off into the bush for a walk along the rushing waters.  For miles we had passed the coursing waters from swollen rivers emptying in a brown, slushy mass into Superior.  Rains had created an northern wonderland with beautiful wildflowers and tall grasses waving to us along side the road.  As we hiked up the trail, we looked over the angry river roaring at us, spraying us with mist and baptizing us with the promise of new memories to come.  It was not a difficult hike, but on the back end to the falls, there were many stairs.   It would have been easier for us to forego the stairs and just stare over the river, but the falls beckoned to us.  Aurally, we could hear the crashing water over the rocks.  Just to see it would be amazing, but that would take some effort.  As with all of life, if you want to experience something incredible, effort is required.

We live in a generation that seeks to expend as little energy as possible.  We expect that experiences will be brought to us, that somehow the internet or our cell phones will help us to enjoy life at its greatest.  We expect that a movie or a video about Lake Superior will suffice and bring us joy, but this generation, and its presumed allergy to patience, will slowly sink into the depths of its own self interest eventually if we don't get out, put our screens down and feel - literally feel the world around us; experience the nervousness of descending the stairs to see the majesty of a waterfall in flooded waters.  As we reached the falls, I took a few moments to sit in the dirt to feel the presence of God in that moment.  Just like Moses was required to take off his sandals in the holy place, so I felt connected to earth in that holy place by touching the ground, the leaves, the water and, seemingly, the sky.  With energy expended, one of the great places in the world was revealed. 

But then we had to climb the stairs to go back. 

Any time you have to leave a place, the return seems more grueling.  Climbing the stairs was difficult, especially for Ryan as he couldn't find his socks and was wearing flip flops (thongs) instead.  Walking back down the path back to the cars was a bittersweet moment.  It was hard to leave a place of beauty, but the sweetness that was to come was that I would soon see my parents and my sister Dani and her family as soon as we crossed the border into Canada. 

It was time to ascend the stairs.

There's No Place Like It... part 1

I landed in Los Angeles with no fanfare and very little awareness about the reality of where I was.  After sweating out the walk through the grainy air of the west coast metropolis, I gathered my bags from the conveyor belt and made my way through U. S. customs.  I only had ninety minutes to catch my connecting flight to Chicago then to Minneapolis, so I was impatient to get moving.  After gathering my bags, putting them on the conveyor belt to (hopefully) await me in Minneapolis, I realized I was hungry.  This was not a regular kind of hungry...

This was a Cheetos kind of hungry.

It's not that I am particularly attached to Cheetos as they seem as if the manufacturers gathered twigs from the factory grounds, dipped them in extraordinarily salty cheese and packaged them with the grinning face of Chester the Cheetah.

I paid an exorbitant amount for an extremely small bag.  I consumed the thirty seven orange twigs in seventeen seconds and then licked the coagulated cheese from my fingers relishing every little grain.  Perfect.  When you find the thing you've been missing, you relish it even more.  Sometimes you don't even remember what it is that you miss only that there is a small, empty space inside you that used to be full and now it is a vacuum.

It would be somewhat superficial of me to write that I have a Cheetos size hole in my heart, but Cheetos were representative of all the things that I had missed and wasn't even really aware of it.  Whether Cheetos, Mr. Pibb, Dairy Queen Blizzards, freshwater lakes, squirrels or chipmunks, I never noticed how the little things are the things that make home, well, home.  Not just physical minutiae of the past, but sounds and smells too that bring memories to the forefront of my mind.  Those sights and sounds that seem to play on a projector screen just behind my conscious vision. 

Like the timbre of my mother's voice or the wrinkles in my uncle's face that used to be backroads and are now threatening to become superhighways.  Perhaps it's the smell of the black earth baking in the steaming hot summer sun or the aromas clinging to the grandparents' houses.  Each sense is loaded with a backpack of memories and for much of my three week vacation back to the United States, I found myself staring whimsically into a sunset or breathing deeply of pine forests and pungent fish houses. 

I guess I went home.  And if I really think about it, home is the place that never feels like you really left. 

I visited almost every place that I had lived.  Sometimes on my travels I was drawn to the obscure; I took a path that I hadn't even intended just to see what memory would surface.  Other times, the thread which I followed was like that which Ariadne provided Theseus for his travel into the labyrinth. 

The thread began in Los Angeles.  I heard later from Christine that when I had landed, a group of youth from my old church, Our Savior's Lutheran in Rockford, let out a cheer.  It's nice to feel wanted and missed.  It's nice to know that there are people in this world who enjoy the homecoming as much as you enjoy going home.  To be missed, that's a real blessing.

I flew from Los Angeles to Chicago beginning in the late morning.  Traveling above the clouds, looking across  the curvature of planet earth, I looked at the far distant contrails of other planes carrying their own mythical warriors to far off places.  As I flew thousands of feet above the earth, I knew the places where I would go, but I had questions to how I would react.  Would home feel the same?  Would it be like Dorothy's return trip to Kansas, black and white, same faces?  Because I am changed by the place I now call home, would my past home still remember me?  With great excitement buoyed by small polka dots of anxiety, I landed in Chicago. 

There I sat for over an hour waiting for the next plane to take off.  Supposedly the pilots, who had just flown in from New York, didn't get the memo that my brother was circling the Minneapolis/St. Paul airport in his white car towing a bass boat waiting to pick me up.  As I had already been in transit over 24 hours, I was not in the mood to be waiting.  Waiting. Waiting.

Grumpy Old Man

Maybe I'm getting old.  I guess it's not even maybe anymore; now that I've begun the fifth decade of life, I've got gray in my beard, hair in my ears and every morning it feels like I'm walking on tacks.  My back hurts and pretty soon the only thing I'll be talking about is my monthly trip to the doctor's office where I can then list the prescriptions I'm taking as if I'm reciting my lines for the school play.  Basically, I'm turning into a 'grumpy old man.'

It's not about the aches and pains, really; I think it's more about the sense of nostalgia that keeps washing over me like a tidal wave.  I begin more and more sentences with, "I remember when..." or "When I was growing up..." as if somehow the memories I have stored up in the treasure chest in my own head are worth more than the ones I am adding now.  Just this last week I had a discussion with my daughters about how Christine and I got engaged.  I'm going to attempt to recapture, verbatim,  how the conversation went down.

Sitting at the dinner table, we had placed our forks and knives on the plates, sat back with hands on bellies when Elsa asked (it was Mother's Day), "How did it happen with you and Mom?"

"Your mother couldn't live without me so she made me marry her."

"No, really, Dad, how did it happen?  How did you ask Mom to marry you?"  I took a deep breath.  The girls had heard the story before, but I suppose young girls don't get tired of fairy tales.

"After our Youth Encounter team, your mother came to stay with me at my parent's house in the United States for a few days.  It was right before Christmas and because Grandpa and Grandma live in a colder section, well away from any kind of shopping center, when we went shopping, we made sure we got everything we needed all at once.  Christine didn't want to go shopping, so I went to Forest City, which was about half an hour away.  Grandma gave me a shopping list and your mother asked me to pick up just one thing."

"What was it?" Elsa asked.

I looked nervously at my two youngest daughters who were sitting in rapt attention, chin in hands on the table, smiles perched waiting for the rest of the story.  Fortunately, we'd already had 'the talk.'  I swallowed hard.  "Your mother wanted me to pick up some, ummm, delicate, ummm, products..."

Christine laughed, "Pads, Dear, feminine products.  You can say it with me, 'pads.'"

You know how some words are harder to say than others?  That's the one for me.  "Yes, well, because your mother and I knew each other well by that point as we'd spent the last seventeen months traveling together, she had no difficulty in asking me to purchase, ummmm, said product. During our travels the 3 fellas often had to buy for the 4 ladies on our team if we were the ones going shopping!"

 I didn't have any problems actually buying them, only saying them.  That day when I went to purchase the pads (it's much easier to write), I brought them to the check out line and the lady who was running the cash register didn't know the price so over the intercom she asked for a 'Price check on Tampax.  Can I get a price check on Tampax?"  No one did it immediately, so she yelled across the aisle, "HEY JENNY, CAN YOU GO LOOK AT THE PRICE OF A TWENTY PACK OF TAMPAX PADS?"

I'm positive she did it on purpose and why not?  I'm a twenty something young man in small town Iowa buying feminine products.

"So," I continued my story, "I finished shopping and brought all the groceries home.  It was just a few days before Christmas so before your mother returned home to Australia, we decided to have our own Christmas celebration at my parents' house.  My parents had bought her a few presents and I had a few things of my own for her.  I spent the afternoon wrapping them and getting everything ready for the unveiling under the Christmas tree."

"What happened next, Daddy?" Greta asked.

"We all sat around the colored lights, Christmas music blaring in the background, full bellies and high spirits.  After opening all the presents, I had one present left for Christine.  It was a special gift."

Josephine clapped her hands and giggled with glee.  She proceeded to put her fingernails in her mouth while smiling broadly.  "The rest of my family was busily putting away wrapping paper and bits of tape that were stuck to things when I announced, 'Just a second, everyone.  I have one more present for Christine."

"My mother gasped, I think, and my father was speechless.  From inside the tree I took the tiny package and approached your mother.  She told me later that every cell inside her head was screaming, 'NOT HERE!  NOT LIKE THIS!' but I couldn't be held back.  Before I handed her the gift I said, 'Christine, after spending all this time with you, the last seventeen months, I've grown to care about you very deeply.  In fact, I feel as if I know everything about you and you know everything about me.  So tonight, because of all that we have shared, because we trust each other with all things, I want to give you this." 

I got down on a knee to give her the gift.  My mother was already wiping a tear from her eye; my dad looked flabbergasted.  With shaking hands, your mother received her gift and began to open it.  When she saw what it was, she began to laugh. 

It was the small box of pads she had asked me to buy.

To this day, I'm still not sure if my mother has overcome the horror of that moment.  Instead of a ring and instead of thinking about planning for a wedding in Australia, she saw her son give his girlfriend ummmm, feminine products.

My daughters laughed with delight. That's their dad they have come to love, I guess. 

"So how did you really get engaged, Dad?"  Elsa asked.

"Your mother left for Australia two days later.  I called her very early in the morning - it must have been about 4:30.  She had not yet recovered from jet lag so she was awake.  My parents had a telephone in their kitchen, but back then, all telephones, basically, were attached with a curly cord to the wall."

"Ooooooh," the girls were awed by the fact that a telephone was connected to anything else.

"So, in an attempt to escape the prying ears of my parents, I pulled the cord to it's maximum distance, all the way to the bathroom.  It was there that I talked to your mother for the first time since our separation, one in which she cried heavily and I stayed strong, stoic, ready to move on to the next day."

"Daaaaad," Elsa rolled her eyes.

"Well," I continued, "That's the way I remember it.  I went into the bathroom, talked to your mother and with kind of this stuttering, muttering moment, I spit out that I didn't think I could live without her.  She said the same thing and wanted to know what I wanted to do about it.  She does like to get to the point.  I asked her to marry her, while I was in the bathroom of my parents' house, 10,000 miles away.  She said yes."

Greta asked, "Were you down on one knee?"  That's all that matters for little girls who have grown up watching every Disney princess movie available. 

"Yes, Greta, I was on one knee."

"That's so romantic, Daddy," my eleven-year-old daughter said.  Everything is romantic to an almost pre-teen, isn't it?

Re-telling the stories of life are important.  Even if they aren't 100 percent entirely accurate, the truth remained in the story telling allows us to dream the dreams of life.  Telling stories requires patience and trust and relationship.  It's the kind of thing that is almost completely absent in todays wireless world. 

So the grumpy old man comes out while thinking about that $30 twenty minute telephone call to Australia.  I was walking at school the other day chatting with a couple of young men and I asked them what they were going to do for the weekend.  One of the boys said that he was going get some friends to come over to his house.

"So you're going to call them up?  Make the arrangements?" I asked still caught somewhere in the 20th century of communication, imagining that the young men would spend a little time organizing the details of the night.

The boy rolled his eyes.  "No, I'm not going to call them.  I'll just text them and see what happens.?"

"Don't you want to talk to them?" 

"Yes, but..." and this blew this grumpy old mind, "It's a waste of credit."

"What?  Talking to your friends is a waste of credit?"  The boys walked away from me laughing. 

So, I'm left pondering anew the wired world in which we live.  For this beginning old man, there is nothing so frustrating or even disheartening than to walk down the street, ride on the train - whatever it is publicly that I do - and see seventy percent of the population staring at the small rectangular screen in front of them.  Ignoring the rest of the world, they are so wrapped in the games, or moving pictures, or thumb exercises that they can't even begin to realize the beauty of what interacting verbally does for a human.  Someday, when they really need someone in their lives, just need to hear someone's voice telling them that they care, they might not even be able to understand that kind of communication.  How do we attempt to restore relationship and the gift of story when we aren't even able to sit still and talk for more than thirty-seven seconds?

Ah, what do I know?  I'm just a grumpy old man.

Flooding in Queensland

Sometimes, when you are swimming, you take a deep breath, push off from the end of the pool and kick just to see how far you can get across the pool without coming up for air.  At some point, the necessity for air and the arrival of fear cross paths.  The reality of the situation is you will make it through, but there is just that short fragment of doubt that perhaps you've dived too far and you won't be able to get that next breath.  The longer you go, the more the fear.  That tightening of the chest; the coursing of adrenalin feels like electricity shooting through the arteries from your heart.  Fear causes flailing - anything to breathe again.  But you've been working so hard, so tired, it would now be so easy to quit...

I can sense that in Queensland today.  As we watched the TV for news updates and as we received and sent calls to neighbors and friends in the area, massive amounts of fear course through the heartland of the Lockyer Valley.  Dumbstruck faces, THE question, "When will this end?" It started raining last week sometime and it finally broke sometime in the middle of the night.  So as we watch updates wanting to cover our eyes, we know that this newest flood has a chance of pulling us all under.  Fear will cause us to flail; even though we've been working so hard, so tired, it would be very easy to quit...

Many of the small towns surrounding Gatton were flooded even worse than 2011.  Although the death toll, thankfully, is much less, property damage will reach or even be worse than two years ago.  We live on a hill in Gatton so we have not been physically affected by this flood (yet) but as part of the corporate community, once the waters go down, we'll be out and about with those who have lost.  My guess is that people will have lost much property but they will also have seen something else float away:

Hope.

Already, silently, squirreled away in the shock and numbness of the newest raging torrent, is the question, "How will we rebuild, again?  Can we rebuild, again?  Will this happen, again?  What's the point?"  Perhaps my job will be even more important not necessarily to be a counselor, or even a prayer, or even a man who cares deeply for the lives of God's children, but my role may be to help people surface to breathe in hope.  It may take much longer this time; the residual effects of this flood will interminably hang on.  Sweeping out the water and mud, cleaning garbage from the fence posts and washing the sediment from shop floors - the task of humanity is once again to band together and stand with each other as we resurface.

There is no moral of my blog today.  It feels like the morality of the storm wiped clean any kitchy platitudes to tie up the end.  I leave you with this; from Romans 5 - it was (is) our theme for the school year that will now (hopefully) begin tomorrow.

Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have gained access by faith into this grace in which we now stand.  And we rejoice in the hope of the glory of God.  Not only so, but we also rejoice (this does not mean being happy about suffering, but believing that God will lead us through) our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope.  And hope does not disappoint us because God has poured out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, whom he has given us.

Please pray for all those affected by the Queensland floods.  Write, call, text to your loved ones; encourage them find ways to offer hope - again.

Le Beach

We went to the beach yesterday.  Because I grew up in the midwest of the United States, this is a real treat for me.  The biggest thing we have to a beach in Iowa is probably a one hundred foot section of sand on Lake Okoboji - the sand was probably imported from somewhere, and, it has enough mud and stones in it that I wouldn't exactly compare it to...

The Gold Coast.  If you say it, the name 'Gold Coast' brings about images alternatively of beautiful sand and pirates.  The Gold Coast stretches more than a hundred feet, in case you wanted to know and incorporates places with fanciful sounding names like Coolangatta, Binna Burra, Burleigh Heads and Canungra.  From New South Wales all the way to (basically) Brisbane, Queensland, white sand beaches cover the coast like the edges of a table cloth.  The sand is so soft that as you step on top of it, you sink ankle deep.  The sand is so hot, however, you run across the top of it attempting not to scald the bottoms of your feet (and your ankles).  You can always tell the tourists because they dance down the sand as if with each step some kind of Sand Ness Monster is seeking to rip the toes from their feet, all the while  Australians try to act tough by walking barefoot across the molten sand, nonchalantly looking hither and yon wondering if anyone is watching, but on their face is written their pain. Secretly, inside their brains they are yelling, "Ouch, ouch, ouch, I've got to get to the water."

The sand is so hot, I'm surprised it hasn't turned to glass yet. 

(Surfers' Paradise, Gold Coast, QLD)

We took off yesterday morning early, loaded up the snacks, the boogie boards, the beach towels and books (all the necessities of beach life) and drove the ninety minutes to a place called Surfer's Paradise.  What a great name for a beach.  It's a misnomer, though.  There weren't many surfers, but there were a whole lot of young men and women parading in front of each other with such small amounts of fabric covering their bodies, I thought perhaps that a small trip on the sand would send the swimsuit flying through the air in explosive glory.  I'm not puritanical with regards to bathing suits; When young and searching for a mate, just like any other animal, I guess, it only goes by human nature that we show our, um, assets.  I think the guys are the best, though.  We watched a BBC documentary a while ago called Planet Earth and there was one section on birds of paradise who, when looking for a mate, will fluff their feathers and go to extraordinary lengths, dancing and prancing in order to attract the attention of the females.  There were quite a few male birds of paradise preening and pec popping yesterday.  As we walked along Surfer's Paradise beach, there was a row of young men, shirtless, of course, in the mid afternoon baking sun, actually comparing muscles while alternatively looking up to see if any girls were watching.  Maybe I'm jealous, but my guess is, I'm at an age now where pec popping is far too strenuous, and I'm not sure that Christine would actually be impressed.  Either way, I'm happy to keep my sunsafe top on, lathered in sunscreen and holding on to the hands of an assortment of one or two of my daughters and wife.  I'm sure if there was one girl on the beach who would notice me, it would be because, after struggling in from the surf, I had something hanging from my beard.

We parked only steps from the magma temperatured sand.  The girls, wriggling in the back seat, were unhooked from seat belts milliseconds after arriving and standing by the trunk in anxious anticipation.  They wanted their boogie boards.  Riding on the waves was what they'd been dreaming about during these school holidays.  After gathering their boogie board and 'ouching' down the beach across the sand, they shed whatever accessories we asked them to carry and headed straight into the water.  Christine and I took our time and then we walked to the edge of the continent to let the consistent waves lap our shins and allow the voice of the ocean to drown out any thoughts of stress that might have occurred in the last week.

Within half an hour, though, the Greta came back to us itching.  At first we thought she'd just got some sand under the swimsuit, which is pretty natural, but then we noticed the red welts.  As we were examining her, Josephine approached us with the same problem.  Sure enough, right behind her was the third musketeer. 

Sea lice.


What?  When Christine said, 'sea lice', I thought to myself, "Here we go, another one of these made up Australian words (or things) to make me look a little foolish when I gullibly accept that she, as my loving wife, would always tell me the truth."  Just a few weeks ago, on a hike, we stopped the root of tree which was making a noise.  I was fascinated until Christine told me what it was.  "Farting tree," she said with a look of total sincerity.  "What?" I asked.  "Yes, very rare.  You don't normally get to hear them, but these trees build up with gasses from the ground and then, occasionally, they release those gasses through their exposed roots.  It sounds exactly like a fart."  I'm not normally naive, but she looked so trustworthy, like a one carat diamond on top of an engagement ring, but I was to find out that her words were cubic zirconium.  "That's fascinating," I said, swallowing her words hook line and sinker.  She began to laugh. 

"It's a frog hidden in the roots, silly.  I can't believe you fell for it.  Wait till I tell my brothers."  Just what we all need is brothers-in-law making farting noises (real or imagined) every time you are near.

So, when she said 'sea lice,' I was on guard.  Farting is one thing, but scratching myself incessantly is another.  "No, really, sea lice.  They are really small creatures that, like mosquitoes, bite the skin causing welts.  They live in the ocean, usually in the sea weed.  We were just lucky enough to happen upon them today.  Because Christine and I were in closer to shore, we weren't being attacked as much. 

(Not any of my daughters, but you get the idea - pretty gross)


Now that the girls had been gnawed on, they were reluctant to head back out into the water.  They'd been looking forward to this for a long time and now, something unseen was destroying the joy of the adventure. 

Life is a lot like that.  It usually isn't something we can see that reaches up and rips the joy out of something we've been looking forward to; it's almost always something we don't see, something giving us emotional welts.  We can handle the heat of the shore - we can run across it, but we can't handle sea lice because we can't see them which means we can't avoid them. 

I hope that as you set out on a particularly joyful journey, you enjoy it regardless of the things that threaten to destroy it, whether unseen (attitudes, yours or others) or seen (obstacles of your own making or those that have been placed by others). 

The girls got back into the water and swam to their hearts content.  They are only bites after all.  Plenty of time to recover.

Plenty of time to recover from the beach.