Some of you may have noticed that I ended up taking a break last week. The combination of traveling and Thanksgiving week coalesced into a logjam of busy-ness that effectively shut the door to blogdom. All that is to say, I was too busy. And I hope that you were busy in that wonderful, blessed way, too.

I have a few books that I’m trying to finish before the end of the year, one of them being Devotions – selected poems of Mary Oliver. She has such a gifted way of stringing words together to create beautiful images. I read the poem “Some Herons” recently that contained these lines:

The water
was the kind of dark silk
that has silver lines
shot through it
when it is touched by the wind

The day after reading that, I walked by a pond and saw exactly what she was describing, but I never would have come up with the words.

And then I thought of the well-crafted poem of Alfred, Lord Tennyson called The Eagle:

He clasps the crag with crooked hands;
Close to the sun in lonely lands,
Ring’d with the azure world, he stands.

The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;
He watches from his mountain walls,
And like a thunderbolt he falls.

The wrinkled sea…or in this case, the wrinkled pond.

Those descriptions really enhanced my ability to see the water with new eyes. This is the kind of poetry I can enjoy and understand.

Over the last couple of years I’ve made it my business to become acquainted with poetry and poets, having disregarded the whole genre for most of my life. I’ve read acclaimed and lauded poems that seemed like somebody reached their hand into a bowl of words and flung them on the page, for all the sense they made to me. But I am learning that reading poetry is sometimes work – you can’t give up after one reading. Sometimes it’s worth it to read again, to try to ferret out the meaning. And yet, I appreciate the poems that are immediately accessible to me, when the poet takes words that I know well and puts them together in wondrous ways that evoke a response of recognition.

It’s been an interesting journey. Tell me what poets and poems you love, so I can put them on my list!

I’ll probably delete this in the morning…

Grandma Time
Hello, sweet girly!
Let’s get acquainted again
You’re my favorite. ❤️

I’ll probably [not] delete this in the morning.

Shoe/Shoo Haiku
If the shoe says “shoo!”
And the fly cries “shoe!” too.
What should they both do?

It’s haiku week…again!

I’ll probably delete this in the morning.

Dear Elisabeth Elliot,

I first heard your name when a friend of mine, new in Christ, went to the Urbana Missions Conference in Illinois in 1981. I was not a Christian and was still hostile to the whole idea of faith in Christ. My friend Sara told me of hearing you speak about the different roles that men and women have according to how God has made them. She said you maintained that men need to take the initiative with women in relationships – women should not be asking men out or chasing them. When Sara said this, I was affronted. I was offended. My feminist soul cried out against this blatant sexism. But way down deep inside, so deep that I didn’t want to acknowledge it, my heart was relieved to hear these things. I had been living out my feminism by pursuing men, even one time by asking a guy out and then being strangely uninterested in a man who let me do the asking. I did not like this role – it felt unnatural to me – but it seemed to be a betrayal of what I believed to give way to these inner yearnings. You got my attention, Elisabeth. I tucked your name away for future reference.

A couple years later, I came to faith in Christ and early on came across your book Passion and Purity, which was now extremely relevant to me as a single woman who was still struggling with the vestiges of feminism. I don’t think I ever heard you speak in person, but I certainly heard recordings of your speeches and read more of your books: Let Me Be a Woman, Through Gates of Splendor, The Mark of A Man, The Journals of Jim Elliot… You became my spiritual mentor, as you have for so many over the years.

I got married to a wonderful godly man who knows how to lead and took the initiative with me. We started a family and I was drawn back again to your wisdom, your practical guidance, your wholehearted commitment to obeying Christ, and your dry sense of humor as I began listening (as I was able) to your radio show, Gateway to Joy. It would be hard to quantify the many times you spoke to me, encouraged me, corrected me and inspired me through your devotion to Christ and His Word. You helped me work through the difficulties of learning how to submit to my husband and taught me that “submission” wasn’t a dirty word. You told stories about your parents and then about your own experiences as a parent that showed me a better way with our children. You weren’t afraid to tell of your own shortcomings, and oh, what a comfort it was to me to know that prayer was difficult for you, too. I meant to tell you, to write to you about how much you’ve meant to me over the years. But I also knew that you received letters all the time as a public persona and it didn’t seem important to add mine to the mix. I read more of your books: Keep a Quiet Heart, Love Has a Price Tag, A Chance to Die (the Life and Legacy of Amy Carmichael), Quest for Love, A Path Through Suffering…

We raised six children and the first wedding in our family was on June 14, 2015. The next day amid the busy-ness of the day after a big event, I learned that you had died and I realized that all along, I had still been planning to write you that letter. I, who never met you, still grieved your loss.

Recently, your granddaughter, in connection with the Elisabeth Elliot Foundation, starting releasing some of your talks on a podcast. It’s been like having my old mentor back! Thank you, Elisabeth, for telling the truth unflinchingly, whether it is popular or not. Thank you for your godly encouragement and example. Thank you for challenging me as a young feminist woman with your Biblical ideas that were so outrageous I listened in spite of myself. Thank you for urging men and women the world over to say a continual “yes” to God and then to rest in Him and trust that He does everything to make us more like Christ. Your wisdom, faith and courage are much needed today.

And now I say to you what you said at the beginning of every one of your radio shows: “The eternal God is your refuge and underneath are the everlasting arms.”

I thank God for you and for your legacy of faithfulness.

Lynn

I’ll probably…but maybe not…delete this in the morning.

All this time I’ve been writing blog posts and I haven’t done a recipe yet. I’ve pinned enough recipes on Pinterest to know how that goes. The typical recipe blogger gets very chatty about the whole thing and the next thing you know, you’re stuck reading about everything but the recipe. I”m a fairly chatty person myself, but that’s going to end right here.

Recipe for a Dream of Many Colors

Ingredients:

One kind and generous friend who gives you a bag of tulip bulbs. In my case, the friend is named Julie, but yours can come with any name.

One reasonably nice-ish day in November.

A place for planting. I have two barrels out front that will do the trick.

Extra dirt to put over the top.

A long winter, such as we have in Minnesota.

Instructions:

Place your bulbs in the dirt six inches deep or so, tips facing upwards. Cover with dirt.

Wait patiently.

Dream.

Yield:

Two barrels of bursting color and a heart full of gratitude.

You might want to print that out and keep it in your recipe book.

I’ll probably delete this after my dream of many colors comes true.

Archer House Elegy
You don’t mourn the loss of a building,
like you’d mourn the loss of a spouse.
But there was more than just brick and mortar
In the stately old Archer House.

‘Twas built in Northfield, Minnesota
When James Archer rode into town
A year after the Jesse James gang
Tried and failed to bring a bank down.

It sits by the swift Cannon River
And guests would come to retreat –
Looking out the arched dormer windows
O’er the shops on Division Street

The mansard roof was admired
By those who knew architecture.
Some people thought the inn haunted
But of course that was all conjecture.

Last week it went up in flames
There was shock, anger and tears
Oh, the Archer House has been ruined
After 143 years!

What a sad day for Northfield. I hope it gets rebuilt!

I’ll probably delete this in the morning.

Our neighbor texted me late in the afternoon asking me if I was noticing the sunset. First of all, it needs to be said that this is a very nice quality to have in a neighbor – one who not only notices sunsets, but who also makes sure I’m aware that something special is going on out there.

I took some photos and then decided that it might be fun to make an inspirational poster out one of them. I chose a phrase that I recently read in the book Pilgrim’s Progress that I found particularly…particular. You’ll see what I mean.

Isn’t that special? The world needs more decorative pillows embroidered with this kind of timeless sentiment.

My daughter and I are reading through Pilgrim’s Progress together and have enjoyed running across these strange little gems occasionally. Apparently bowels were considered the seat of pity, tenderness and courage. So in today’s parlance, it would read something like this:

It becomes us as Christians to be characterized by pity, tenderness and courage.

But that’s too long for an inspirational poster. I’ll just leave it the way it is.

Let me know if you start seeing this on coffee cups, posters and t-shirts because I started it and I want some form of credit for it. Ha ha!

Deletion of this post becometh the blogger.

P.S. I decided to use a different sunset photo for my poster, so it doesn’t look like the same sunset for a reason. It wasn’t.

I had this funny idea that I knew how to make cookies, having made probably thousands of them over the years. Apparently, you’re never too old to fall flat on your face, your grandiose illusions of competence whisked away like a dream.

We were going to be having a large family over after church and I found a recipe for cookie dough that you make ahead, freeze in a cylinder, and then simply cut slices off and bake fresh when you need them. C’est parfait! (One needs to have some French phrases handy for moments like this.)

I was a little vague in my mind about this process of freezing the dough in a cylindrical shape and hoped by the time I got to that part, the solution would present itself. I don’t actually own the plastic cylinders used for this, but how hard can it be to roll cookie dough up that way? Very hard, as it turned out. The dough was soft and sloppy. I put several large blobs on some waxed paper and did my best to roll it up. It was not a pretty sight. However, I was still largely optimistic when I put it in the freezer thinking that the freezing process would cover a multitude of sins. I went to bed conjuring up pleasant thoughts about how fun it would be make these cookies with two little girls in the family, just the right age for cookie making. It’s funny how we can delude ourselves.

By the time I woke up, the scales had fallen from my eyes. It had occurred to me sometime in the night that the waxed paper would be hard to get off and would have frozen itself into little crevices of dough. It then occurred to me that this might not be the delightfully fun experience that I had pictured with the girls. I decided to make the cookies right away in the morning.

Ugh. I had to slice the paper off where it wouldn’t peel off. It was inextricably bound to the dough at both ends, so I had to cut those parts off and throw them away.

The dough was sticking to everything by this time and was surprisingly hard to cut. Instead of being circles of frozen dough, they were odd and misshapen lumps.

Bake for 14-15 minutes, the recipe said. I had cut them fairly thick and decided to go for 15 minutes. Just one more mistake in a long series of misjudgments.

Voila! Even at this point, I was trying to convince myself that they weren’t really burnt – just kind of “dark,” thus once again proving that “the heart is more deceitful than all else and is desperately sick – who can understand it?”

So there you have it. In a surprisingly display of hubris, I ignored three basic rules of cooking:
1. Don’t try out new recipes on guests.
2. Don’t change anything in the recipe the first time you make it.
3. Use the shorter cooking time – you can always put it back in if it’s not done.

Still, this grim fairy tale has a happy ending. The night before, my daughter-in-law had brought over homemade snickerdoodle cupcakes with caramel and sea salt frosting, and left a whole bunch of extra ones with us. We cut them in half and served them with vanilla ice cream after our meal.

And here’s the best part: I couldn’t resist telling our guests about the cookies, so we tried them and decided they were rather edible after all. I ended up foisting two bags of them on their family as they were leaving.

THE END.

I’d better delete this all in the morning when the scales have fallen from my eyes about this post.

I was scanning back through my photos to find something that I could use in tonight’s post. It’s getting late in the evening and I’m tired. All this points to a short poem on the way. So here’s tonight’s inspiration – a neighbor’s Halloween decoration from a few weeks ago.

Is Mickey a ghost,
Or dressed in angelic garb?
Halloween is weird.

Ain’t it the truth!

Have a wonderful weekend, friends!

I’ll probably delete this…
a. In the morning
b. Never.
c. When the cow jumps over the moon.
d. One of more of the above.

It’s my birthday today and I can’t think of a much better gift for me than getting to spend some time with my Mom, bringing her to a doctor appointment. I haven’t been in her apartment since the lockdown started in March, so I’ll take what I can get.

She’s 93 and often forgets birthdays now, so I was prepared to remind her when I saw her (something on the order of “Guess what you were doing 62 years ago today?). I should have known better – she came prepared with a sweet card written out in her shaky hand. What a treasure!

Some of you who are older know how poignant it is when your parents get old and start to lean on you for strength. When I look at my mom, I still see her as the woman who gave birth to me, who raised me, who took care of me when I was sick, who taught me how to play the piano, who shared her love of reading and music with me…

Her eye doctor was running behind, so while we waited in his office, I played videos from the past 5 years or so on my phone for her. I played the lullaby for her that I had just recorded for our granddaughter and tears sprang to her eyes. I found old videos of her playing a duet with my sister (Mom on the piano, sister on the flute), a video of my two sisters and me singing a trio for Christmas a few years ago, some videos of my mom playing the piano beautifully at a memorial for her sister. I even brought the photo album of my growing up years that she had made and we looked through that together, too. When the doctor finally came in, he was exceedingly apologetic for keeping us waiting for so long, but he needn’t have been. We were soaking up the time together – time that we’re not allowed to have in her apartment anymore.

It was snowing heavily when we left the doctor’s office and I was privately a little nervous about driving in it, but didn’t want to make Mom nervous with those kinds of thoughts. She may have guessed it, because she said, “I always know I’m safe when I’m with you, Lynn.”

You never stop needing your mother and that’s the truth.

We listened to the National Lutheran Choir singing beautiful hymns on the way back to her place. I could tell that she was feeling lonely and somehow unsafe, so when we got back I prayed for her before we got out of the car.

As we made our way up to the front door, we heard the distinctive call of a blue jay almost right overhead.

“Mom, do you hear that blue jay?”

“Oh, is that what that is? I can hear it but I didn’t know what it was.”

“Yes, it’s a blue jay and it must be right near us. I wish we could see it!”

She lifted up her eyes toward the sound with a smile and said good-naturedly to the bird, “Thank you!”

I snuck in a hug and we said goodbye. And now I lift up my eyes to the Maker of the Blue Jay and say, “Thank you!”

It was a good day.

I’ll probably delete this in the morning…

Things are getting icy around here. This morning I took a photo of a perky little brown sparrow sitting atop the shepherd’s crook that holds our bird feeders:

He was too quick for me, but now that you know he was there just milliseconds before I took this photo, you can put him there in your mind. To make up for that photo fail, I offer proof that the squirrels have not been able to vandalize our suet feeder this year (yet):

Frankly, I haven’t even seen them trying to get at it, which makes me wonder if there’s something wrong with either them or the feeder. Is it possible that they’ve conceded the victory to me without so much as an attempt or two? Perversely, I think I would have been happier to see them trying desperately to get at the suet and being stymied by my ingenious wire workings. Silly me.

At the other end of the day (which is coming way too early for me) the sunset was peeking enticingly through the frosted glass pattern on our front door.

In a strange and surreal way, this photo makes me think of Psalm 19, which says:

In the heavens, God has pitched a tent for the sun.
It is like a bridegroom coming out of his chamber,
Like a champion rejoicing to run his course.
It rises at one end of the heavens and makes its circuit to the other;
Nothing is deprived of its warmth.

If you look at it just right, you could imagine that the sun is returning to its tent for the night, having finished its daily work of warming the world and hearing the voice of the Lord saying, “Well done, good and faithful servant.”

There really is a reason why I named this blog “Lynniebeemuseoday.” Sometimes that’s all you get – musings from the meandering mind of Lynniebee. Thanks for meandering with me today.

I’ll probably delete this tomorrow when the sun comes out of its tent rejoicing like a champion to run its course.