One day my friend Sara asked me whether or not I knew about tithing. “What?” I’d heard the word, but wasn’t that an Old Testament thing? I knew that when the offering plate went around, you were supposed to put something in it, but I didn’t give much thought to it. In fact, I usually forgot about it until that time in the service, and then I’d just rifle through my purse to see if I had anything. A dollar ought to be plenty, right? Sara patiently explained to me that tithing meant giving 10 percent of what you earned to the church, and that it was to be given cheerfully, not grudgingly. It was a privilege to be able to contribute to the functioning of the church. I was pleased to have the whole thing explained to me. I was “earning” $125 per month, a generous stipend that was given to internship students, so I began giving $12.50 per month, not begrudging it in the least. It was a relatively easy and concrete way to be obedient. I think I would have been a Pharisee if I’d lived in Jesus’s time. Make a checklist and voila, righteousness achieved! But of course, I knew my righteousness was in Christ and like David, my sins were ever before me, so it was clear that I wasn’t riding into heaven on the strength of my $12.50 per month. 🙂

Meanwhile, there was a small group of Christians in the dorm where I lived, mostly nursing students. We decided as a group to take turns praying about certain things daily and each person had an assigned day. I decided to put cheerful little reminders in each person’s mailbox on their prayer day, using Bible references for them to look up. One day I slipped a reminder into Sandy’s box and gave it no more thought until she stopped by later in the day. Poking her head into my dorm room, she said, “Lynn, I looked up that Bible verse you gave me and I don’t quite understand what you are trying to tell me.” The look on her face was a picture of confusion. I had thought I was referencing a verse in Jeremiah that says “Call to me and I will answer you, and I will tell you great and mighty things that you do not know.” Seemed clear enough to me. Sadly, it turned out I had memorized the reference incorrectly, as Jeremiah 3:3 instead of Jeremiah 33:3. Poor Sandy had looked that up and expecting to be edified and exhorted to prayer, she read the following, “Therefore the showers have been withheld. And the late rain has not come. Yet you had a harlot’s forehead; you refused to be ashamed.” Oops. We had a good laugh over it once we got it straightened out.

There was an intense young woman at our church that I’d gotten to know. One day we were talking and I mentioned that I’d been praying for my family to come to faith in Christ. When she realized that I was the only Christian in my family, she fixed her gaze on me and challenged me, “How can you sleep at night knowing your family isn’t saved?” What a startling statement! I didn’t respond out loud to her the thought that came to my mind, which was, “How will my losing sleep accomplish anything toward their salvation?” I suppose she thought I should be praying instead of sleeping – I didn’t know and I was afraid to ask. From almost the beginning of my Christian walk, I had a surprisingly strong view of the sovereignty of God in salvation. I believed in the power of prayer, but I knew the difference between my part and God’s. Once you begin thinking that the amount of time you spend in prayer is the thing that turns the wheel, then there is never any end to it. Two hours will have to be better than one hour, and three hours will be better than two and so on. No, I did not want to go down that particular rathole. I have a very sensitive conscience; it was one of God’s many kindnesses to me that He kept me from that way of thinking.

If you want to start at the beginning of this series, here you go:
Adventures Part 1

Next part: Adventures Part 8

I’ll probably lose sleep over deleting this in the morning.

Pay attention on the walk that you take. You might just see and hear fantastical things like I did.

The salmon jumped over
The bumblebee
The red-winged blackbird
Sang “O-ka-lee!”
The pine cone bristled
A hundred green arrows
A dewy red tulip
Told of her sorrows

And the red-winged blackbird? She declined to be photographed.

This post will probably jump over a bumblebee in the morning.

Admire my ears!
Beautiful, aren’t they?
Silky, soft
Bendable, flexible
Twitchy, itchy,
And strictly off limits.
Don’t touch –
DON’T TOUCH!
I will bite you.

In other news:

Crispy, crackly, crunchy leaf
Sucked dry by winter
And ready to make room
For green buds.
Joy supplants decay,
The Divine Design.

Snow crystals on the move
But are they ascending
Or receding?

‘‘Twas a poetical day here on the eclectic blog of Lynniebeemuseoday.

Deleting, repeating, adorning the morning. (Poets can talk like that all day long)

I’ve taken a lot of photos of things far away, using the telephoto lens to help me get up close. I put that lens away for a season. It’s time to focus (as it were) on things that are right next to me, things I can hold a camera up to nearly touching them. I’m training my eyes to see what I usually walk right past. Come along with me.

In other news, let me tell you a tale of real life, a small comedy.

I went into a public bathroom today. As I was washing my hands an older lady came out of a stall to wash her hands. “I didn’t think we were going to get here on time,” she said. We were the only two people in this small bathroom, so I felt as though I’d been dropped into a scene without a script. She went on to tell me something about some town in Minnesota. “Are you from around here?” she asked. “No, we’re just traveling through.” I told her where we were from and she offered up that she was familiar with it and told me the city where her son lived, not far from us. “Oh, my sister lives there,” I told her, somewhat surprised that we were still talking to each other. “Really! Well, we live in Spearfish, now,” she went on. At this rate, I expected we’d be exchanging phone numbers any minute. “I’ve been to Spearfish!” I told her, drawn almost against my will into this cozy little exchange. “We visited a church there.” Why was I telling her these things? She perked up and asked, “Was it Our Savior’s Lutheran?” Growing fonder by the moment of this lady, I had to inform her that sadly, it was not. I was ready to leave and suddenly didn’t know how to end this connection, two strangers talking in a bathroom. Instead of a simple “goodbye,” what came out of my mouth was, “It was nice seeing you!” What on earth possessed me?!

I told my husband about it afterward and great was our mirth.

I’ll prolly delly this in the morny.

Not to be confused with The Green Hornet.

This one is for Karl. Bonus haiku below.

The green heron stalks,
Wading at marsh water’s edge
To ambush a fish.

Karl has done his part in the “Reforming the Lazy Artist” initiative. If you’d like to do likewise, just comment on this post and I’ll fire up a watercolor painting for you, small enough to put in the mail. This is mostly for my subscribers who know me, but I could be persuaded to do one for a stranger. Maybe.

I’ll be stalking the blog marsh in the morning to ambush this post.

I’m about to embark on the final project in the book “Little Travellers” by Simone Gooding. I made the first one in May of 2020 and had no idea that I’d not only go on to make the rest, but also would write a story about them along the way. It’s been fun. Let me introduce you to a squirrel named Twig.

As always, I’m open to other names. Twig has a stepping stone picnic blanket and a basket of acorns as well.

I’ve got everything cut out and ready to go – it’s quite labor intensive cutting out all these little pieces of felt and fabric.

I’ve already got some ideas about how Twig will fit into Fig Newton’s story, but I’m not sure yet if Twig is Mr. or Mrs. Twig. Still pondering that one.

There’s always a question of whether or not I’ll really delete this in the morning. Answers may vary.

If you want to start at the beginning of this series, here you go:
Adventures Part 1

I became a regular attender at the local Evangelical Free Church while still going through the dietetic internship. I told my older sister that name of the church and she remarked, “I hope it’s more free than evangelical.” Well, if you had pinned me down, I’m not sure I could have explained what either of those words meant in the context of the church name. A group of singles (college/career) formed at the church and I began rubbing shoulders more with Christians than I ever had. One fellow, Bruce, played the guitar and wrote songs. When I inquired what kinds of songs he was writing, he told me he only wrote songs about the Christian life and faith in Christ. This was truly mystifying to me. “Why restrict yourself just to that?” I asked. He smiled and said faith in Christ was the only thing worth writing about. I was dubious, but remained silent, needing to think about it.

Another fellow, Pete, was a handsome, outgoing and cheerful man who was so friendly to all of us girls that I’m sure I wasn’t the only one who thought he was giving attentions that went beyond brother to sister. Ha! In fact, the issue of the guys being so friendly and the girls misinterpreting the cues got to be such a problem that the associate pastor called us all together for a meeting to straighten us out. “Now, guys, it’s good for you to be friendly, but don’t overdo it; don’t spend time alone with any of the girls and don’t single any of them out unless you have intentions that you are willing to make clear. Flirting might feel like fun, but girls take these things seriously. Be careful.” We girls nodded our heads in agreement with this kind of talk. We felt like we were being led on. But then he turned to us. “Ladies, you really need to keep more of a tight rein on your emotions and your imaginations. When a guy says hello to you more than once, it’s not time to start thinking about the wedding and what kind of curtains you’ll have in your kitchen after you’re married. Don’t blow things up in your mind that have no basis in reality. Be careful.” He had a point there. We did a lot of things together as a group and even though eventually some of the people paired off, it was a good exercise in restraint for all of us to be more careful about how we treated one another and about what went on in our thought lives.

The whole controversy highlighted another change that I’d begun to think about: I could no longer entertain the idea of a relationship with someone who didn’t share my faith in Christ. When I was still in college I had a roommate that had talked to me about the importance of not being “unequally yoked,” but it didn’t mean much to me then. I’m not even sure why she mentioned it to me. But now, I was beginning to understand the concept. I had developed an interest in a guy I had known for a few years and spent a little too much time thinking about him and writing about him in my journal – and I was pretty sure the attraction was mutual. It would take only the barest encouragement from me to get this relationship going. The facts had to be faced, however; he was definitely not a Christian. This was probably one of the first times that I felt I was being asked to give something up for Christ, something that I really wanted. I vacillated so much in my mind over this man that I finally realized that I had to surrender my will and give him up, as it were. I said those words out loud “I surrender,” and instead of a sense of sadness, I felt an immediate release and joy, a complete sense of peace. It was settled and the temptation was completely gone. Not too long after that, I wrote a letter to “My husband,” a letter I hoped to be able to give some day to the man I would marry, even though I did not yet know who that would be. But I knew he would belong to Christ and that was the most important thing.

I’ll probably put a kerchief on this post in the morning to cover it up.

The next one:
Adventures Part 7

If you look it up, birding books will tell you that one of the robin’s songs sounds like “cheerily, cheerily…” Pay no attention to those false interpretations – I’ve got the real scoop on it. By listening very carefully, I’ve divined that the robin actually has a very different message for us:

This one is for my friend Julie, who probably gets tired of hearing me sing that song to her. If you’re of a certain age, you’ll know that song, too.

If you want to contribute to the “Reforming the Lazy Artist” initiative, just ask and I will send you a small watercolor painting (that one is 4” x 5”). I’ll choose the subject. You can expect art of the same quality as above, i.e. fair to middling. But it’s free, so you can’t really complain.

If I don’t delete this post, I’ll be reforming the lazy blog post writer one post at a time…in the morning.

Willow was known to enjoy a good wander, so she became known as Willow Wanderer, a pleasing name to the ear and especially to her big rabbit ears. But she could just as well have been called Willow Murmurer for her habit of murmuring to herself as she meandered along.

On this beautiful day, Willow was ambling through the woods searching for what she called “treasures of the earth.” You and I might think she was looking for silver and gold, but we would be mistaken. All treasures to Willow were strictly culinary ones, things she could pick, nibble, and put in soups and stews and other such delights. She was a connoisseur of the hidden and overlooked victuals in the ground. Anyone who received an invitation to a meal at Willow’s home could count on having something deeply satisfying, the kind of food that makes you rub your belly appreciatively when the meal is over, just for the sheer joy of remembering what you just put into it.

And so, Willow ambled and murmured, only running when her ears told her to, which wasn’t often in these silent woods.
“Oh look, some buttercups,” went Willow. Nibble, nibble.
“Do I see raspberry leaves?” murmured Willow. Those went in her bag.
“Ah, that must be a snippet of kale,” said she. Nibble, nibble.
“Is that a carrot? Hmmm, no, it’s a parsnip. I’ll take one for my soup tonight.”

All of a sudden she realized she’d been hearing the chattering of the river for awhile and it was getting louder. “How did I get so close? And what’s that floating out there in the middle?”

Something was indeed floating in the river, gently moving with the current. Before she had a chance to see what it was, a small boat came around the bend and she quickly hid behind the bushes. As the boat started to go by, Willow received a shock upon seeing none other than Phineas Fox in it. How glad she was that she had hidden, for foxes and rabbits are no more friendly in her world than they are in ours. “Phineas Fox!” she whispered to herself. “What is he doing in a boat? There’s mischief involved if Phineas is in it, there’s mischief all over!”

As Phineas Fox went by, she heard him calling out, “Wait up! Can’t you get caught on a tree limb in the water or something? Help a fellow out!” The boat was a little too small for him and Willow giggled to herself to see him trying to steady himself in it while he rocked back and forth with the waves. He had an oar in his hands, but his flailing around with it wasn’t helping him at all.

She watched him until the boat went out of sight around the next bend in the river and then gave a sigh of relief. “Oh my, that was a close call. Willow, you wool-headed wanderer, pay attention!” But then she chuckled again at the memory of Phineas trying to row the boat.

Willow tucked her bag under her arm and began running for home, wanting to be somewhere safe. Catching sight of a glimpse of something yellow, she hid again, but came out upon seeing it was only Clive delivering the mail. He was slow but you could always count on him.

“Clive, you’ll never believe what I just saw!” Passing on news was almost as enjoyable as finding a good tidbit to eat and Willow relished the opportunity to tell Clive what she’d seen. She described Phineas’s wobbly plight in the small boat so well that both of them were alight with amusement.

Clive was a curious snail and peppered Willow with questions about which arm of the river she’d seen him on, where was the sun in the sky at the time, and could she describe the object she’d seen him chasing after. On that last subject, Willow had to stop and think. “It looked like a basket of some sort, but I couldn’t see what was in it,” she told him. “And now, I must get home. My nerves are a little frazzled. Yes, I’m feeling a little frazzled.”

She left Clive and continued on her way, and he went on his way looking thoughtful. As a deliverer of mail, he was also a collector of information. He tucked it all away just in case. He had finished his rounds and was heading home himself.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

If you don’t give a fig about this post, I’ll delete it in the morning.

To start at the beginning of this story, follow this link:
Fig Newton Part 1
Next episode: Fig Newton Part 10

Willow in her wanderings has plucked a parsnip out of the ground and placed it carefully in her bag. I suspect it will make its way into a hearty soup later. Willow wanders far afield in search of her victuals, but always returns to the place she calls home. I’m not sure (she hasn’t told me) why she needs to wear the knitted wristbands. Perhaps to keep her sleeves clean as she goes to and fro. As soon as I knit the second one, she’ll be all set.

On the topic of parsnips, I cede all the world’s parsnips to Willow and her ilk. I made something with parsnips once and decided not to repeat the performance.

I’ll probably toss this post in the compost pile, along with the parsnip peels.

My dad became a private in the United States Army in June of 1945, having been drafted when he turned 18 earlier that year. When he was in his 50’s, he decided to create a memoir of his army experiences. His parents and brother had saved all of his letters home (a good rule of thumb: always save letters) and he interspersed those with his own memories of his time in the Army. He included his original comic illustrations from those letters.

I was reading Part One of these memoirs to my mother recently and came across the following story which took place shortly after he arrived at Fort Lewis in Washington state. He and another guy had some free time, so they hitchhiked into Tacoma.

Don and I were in Tacoma one Saturday evening looking for something to do when we were stopped on the street by two well dressed gentlemen.
“Hello there,” the first one greeted us with a smile, “we’re having a party for servicemen at our church this evening. There’ll be cake and ice cream and some girls for you to meet. How about driving over there with us?”
Meeting the girls sounded interesting, but it was the cake and ice cream that got us into the car for a short trip across town to the church. I had assumed that the party would be in the basement, but we were led up the front steps to the main entrance of the church. When the doors were opened, I saw a whole church full of servicemen and realized that we’d been tricked into attending an evening church service.
After we were seated, the minister gave his sermon and then invited everyone to come down to the altar to accept Jesus as their personal savior. That was something we had never done in our church back home in Duluth.
While the organ played in the background, ushers came up the aisles and asked everyone they could reach to come down to the altar. I was getting nervous because Don and I were second and third from the aisle and were sure to be asked. When the usher reached our row, he asked a young sailor on the aisle if he would like to come down to the altar.
“Oh, no,” said the sailor, “I can’t do that, I’m Jewish.”
“I understand,” said the usher and turned to Don. “What about you?” he asked.
“Ahhh, I’m Jewish too,” replied Don, thinking fast.
“And your friend?” asked the usher, pointing to me.
“Oh, he’s Jewish, too,” said Don, while I nodded my head in agreement.
After the service there was a party downstairs with lots of ice cream and cake. The girls were there as promised and several came over to chat with us before we left. Although we had the answer for an invitation to come up to the altar, Don and I decided not to attend any more church parties in Tacoma.

I found this story both amusing and sad. It was funny to read about their creative way of escaping the invitation to the altar, but sad to think that the people at the church thought deceiving people was an acceptable way to get them in the door of the church. The net effect on my dad was clearly a negative one.

When I was still a young Christian I invited a friend of mine to see a movie with me which I was told had a Christian message. A couple days before the movie I found out that there would be an altar call at the movie theater after the movie had ended and I was somewhat horrified at the thought. I didn’t want my friend to think that I’d entrapped her into this, so I told her ahead of time and gave her the option to back out. At the very least she would know what she was getting into. She appreciated the heads up and decided to come anyway. Too bad the movie wasn’t that great. I’m not a big fan of altar calls, but this one was low pressure, unlike what happened with my dad. If I’d seen ushers coming up the aisle to nab people, I would have grabbed my friend and run for the exit.

I’ll probably delete this…wait a minute. Did you say cake and ice cream? Gotta go!