Living as Apprentices

A few days ago, I told my husband the story of Jim, a literacy student I worked with decades ago.  It brought tears to my eyes -not for the first time.  I thought I had written a post about so I searched using the words “file cabinet.”  There it was – posted on Feb.25, 2015. I’m re-posting it to remind us  all of the possibilities in all the people God brings into our lives.

He was tall and hefty and always spoke with his outdoor voice. He worked for the county Road Commission. In his 40’s he came to the Family Literacy Center looking for help with his reading. He had collected dozens of “coffee table books” because he was eager to learn about a variety of subjects.  He believed that if he could just learn to read he could do anything, including finding a job that was not backbreaking work.

As the director of the program, I interviewed and tested him.  He was basically illiterate and suffered from the worst case of dyslexia I have ever seen.  I gently attempted to steer him away from this impossible goal, but he would have none of it.  He wanted a tutor!  I decided to tutor him myself because I didn’t know if any volunteer would have the patience.

We worked together for several years. I finally decided that the key to helping him was to convince him that he was not dumb or stupid but had a disability that was preventing him from learning to read. We worked hard at slowing down and attacking words letter by letter so he could be sure that he was seeing the right letter in the right order – and then applying what he had learned about phonics.  It was excruciating process to watch, but a liberating process for him.

About halfway into his tutoring experience, he came into a session and said he wanted to quit. He had tried to drive by himself to Atlanta to visit family, but when he got on the freeways leading into the city, he couldn’t  find the right exit.  Finally he  got so frustrated, he turned around and came  home. All the self-esteem we had worked so hard to build went right out the window. We talked for an hour. I explained that I have the same problem driving in unfamiliar areas.  But he was devastated by the experience and quit.  I didn’t blame him.

After several months he stopped by the office.  He wanted to try again.  So we began again. I used every technique I knew, including writing in sand, but still he struggled.  Eventually we began having discussions about being happy with who he was as a person even if he couldn’t read much better.  He would always shake his head and say he wanted to keep trying.

One day he came into the room with a big smile on his face and a gleam in his eye.  He sat down and the story poured out.  He had gone to work that morning and gotten his work orders as usual. In his truck, he looked at the paper. As the years had gone by, he had memorized many street names, but he wasn’t familiar with this one. He had no idea where to go. Somehow he learned the area the road was in and drove up and down the streets looking for the intersection. Finally he came up to a road that he thought might be it.  He stopped his truck and, as he had learned to do, compared the letters on the paper to the letters on the sign – one by one.  It was the road!!

He looked at me, grinning,  and said, “I figured it out by myself!”  We talked about what a great feeling it is to accomplish something on your own.  Finally he said, “I think it’s time to stop the reading lessons.  I’m never going to be able to read the books I bought.  It probably was silly to buy them.  But it’s okay. I can do what I have to do.  And better yet, I’m proud of who I am.  Thank you so much!”

A few months later I saw his truck pull up to my house. My heart sank a bit; I hoped he wasn’t going to ask if he could be tutored again. He unloaded something from the truck and then knocked on the door. “This is for you,” he said.  “It’s my thank you. I saw it in the dump and I said to myself, “I bet I can fix this up for Karen. I’m sorry it took so long, but it was a lot of work!” He stepped aside and I saw a beautifully finished three-drawer wooden file cabinet. “I figured with all the papers you have, you could use this.”

I could barely speak.  “You got this out of the dump?”

“Yeah, it was pretty damaged and it took a lot of sanding and a bunch of coats of stain, but I think it looks pretty good.” 

I said, “It’s beautiful!  Thank you!”

As he turned to go he said,  “Well, you always said that I was talented and to be proud of who I am even if I can’t read.  It was a lot of work, but I proved to myself that you were right.”

(“‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one
of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.”)

Note:  E-mail followers and LinkedIn members received this post last week. But for some reason it disappeared from the actual Word Press blog site. After a half hour of “back-and-forth-ing” in the Help Chat Room yesterday, the expert and I agreed that the post was gone forever – who knows why or where. I decided to republish it because I think the statement it makes is important. So if you get a second e-mail notification for this post, just ignore – or read it again and be doubly blessed.

Gratitude makes us feel bursting with delight just to remember the gifts we have received. Thus we are double blessed when we receive something; for the gift itself and later, in the recall, for the memory of having been given it.  M.J. Ryan.

Since we moved into our new apartment a few months ago, I have been wishing for an inexpensive floor lamp for a dark corner in the living room. But medical expenses made that an unwise use of money. A few days ago a friend called from the Bibles for Mexico thrift shop saying that she has been looking for a lamp for us and thinks she has found one. She didn’t like the shade, and as we were talking, she said the switch didn’t work.  She would see if the store would trade out the shade and get her a new switch.  “I’ll call you in a minute,” she said in great excitement.

I sat down in some confusion.  Why is she getting me a lamp? What if I didn’t like it? Soon the phone rang, and my friend reported success. The lamp was ready to go. Could she come over now? I said, “Sure, do you know how to get here?” I started giving directions and she said “That’s enough. I’ll call you back when I get that far.” Which she did.  Soon she was standing at the door – lamp in hand.

We went in the house and I put the lamp where I had always imagined it. It fit just right, just as I had imagined it! I was really excited. She turned it on, demonstrating the three-way switch, and we stepped back. “It’s perfect!” I shouted.” I might have even jumped up and down. She smiled and smiled and smiled.  “Why did you do this? I asked.  “Because I love you,” she said, “and because God put your need for a lamp in my mind and heart and I couldn’t let it go.”

“But it’s so perfect!” I said teary-eyed. “It’s just right. Look how cozy the room looks now! How did you know what I wanted?”  She just smiled.

I have had the lamp for about a week. I smile at it fondly every time I go past it.  I turn it on first thing in the morning.  In the evening, it stays on until I go to bed. Every time I look at it, I am reminded of the friend who listened to God’s “marching orders” until she found me a lamp. And as M.M. Ryan says in the quote above, I am “doubly blessed” by the gift and how it constantly reminds me of how God cares about my life.

“Imagine that we could live each moment as a moment pregnant with new life. Imagine that we could live each day as a day full of promises. Imagine that we could walk through the new year always listening to the voice saying to us: ‘I have a gift for you and can’t wait for you to see it! Imagine'” (Henri Nouwen).

I have devoted many years to attempting to live in the moment, with varying degrees of success.  I have also worked on bringing a positive presence into the world; the onslaught of Donald J. Trump for the past three years has gotten the best of me in that spiritual discipline.  However, when I read, “I have a gift for you and can’t wait for you  to see it,” I was filled with hope. The Creator of the Universe has a gift for me and is filled with anticipation as to whether I will find it and what I will do with it.

What if I could wake up every morning in 2020 and before I maneuver my rickety old body off the bed hear God say, “I have a gift for you and can’t wait for you to see it.”  How would that change my day? And how would those days change my year? How would that change me?

I began to ponder.   What might those gifts be?

Maybe the gift as I limp into the Cancer Center will be the renewal of God’s promise long ago on the shores of Lake Michigan,  “My child I will always take care of you.”

Maybe the gift will be a “Wow, look at that, Karen” so I notice a baby’s smile, a courteous driver, a helpful sales clerk, a flourishing plant, a turn of phrase in a new book,

Or perhaps my gift will be an idea for a food my husband might be willing to try, or a joke I ran across to lift his spirits. Or perhaps my gift would be a prompting to go in his room and sit quietly by his bed and keep him company.  And now that I think about it, maybe the time when I was ready to pop off with a critical comment and suddenly saw it as mean and unnecessary was a gift from God.

My gift could be a scripture verse, or a musical phrase, or a memory that pops into my mind and brings me joy. It could be an encouraging thought during a dark day or a reminder to deal positively with whatever the day brings.

If I am willing to listen, my gift could be a jolt when I recognize I am about to say something critical or mean or share something a friend has told me in confidence.  The gift could be a kind response to a negative person, a reminder that God delights in him or her, too.

The idea of this project is not to expect gifts from God, but rather to live in anticipation of communing with God and to respond in a way that brings him pleasure.  Imagine!

One of my  writing groups is focusing this month on revising an old piece to make it sharper and clearer and more cohesive – the best writing they are capable of. I picked a post from 2015. As I worked on it, I thought that this foundational understanding of spiritual formation would be a good post for the new year. Here is the revised standard version of that post.

I knew something was different when I calmly thought, “Guess I’ll have to go to the gas station after all.”

 I had taken on the task of vacuuming my car because for weeks my husband had ignored my hints and eventual nagging to do “his” job.  One Saturday it became obvious that if the job were to be done, I would have to do it. I began looking for quarters to take to the gas station. Then it dawned on me that we had recently acquired an old hand vac from my mother. The first task was finding it.  Then I grabbed it, went outside, and got to work.

I was happily vacuuming the back seat when the bag flew off the vacuum.  The dirt and dust I had just vacuumed blew all over me and the newly cleaned car!  I looked at the ruined vacuum cleaner and “Guess I’ll have to go to the gas station after all.”

On the way home from the gas station, it occurred to me that several of my usual behaviors had not taken place that morning. I had not nagged my husband nor complained about doing “his” job. When the vac fell apart, no “blue” language (learned by osmosis from my years of tutoring in the county jail) flew from my mouth. I had not thrown the vac across the yard. I had not moaned and complained to my husband about the tragedy of the exploding hand vac. I had not said, “I’m NOT cleaning this car again!”  I had merely found a solution and finished the job.

How could this be?!  Then it dawned on me. After two years of training to be an apprentice of Jesus, behaving like Jesus was becoming a way of life. The more I see myself as one in whom Christ dwells and delights, the more I am choosing to act like Christ.

CHOOSING TO ACT LIKE JESUS

Sometimes I don’t even realize that I am different until I look back – as with the hand vac incident.  Other times I need to make a deliberate choice to act differently than I have in the past.  In his book The Good and Beautiful Community, James Bryan Smith calls this choice-making a “space of grace.” He relates the story of an architect who was asked, “Can we build a [church] building that will help us compete with the church down the road?”  The architect paused and said, “Give me a second.” He took a deep breath before he said, ‘I needed to think for a minute whether I was going to answer that question from inside or outside of the kingdom of God.”

As apprentices of Jesus, we learn to stop and consider if the word we are about to speak or the action we are about to take comes from inside or outside of the Kingdom. The idea of taking a pause before we speak or act mimics a fact from the natural world of physics. Long ago I learned from Stephen R. Covey in The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People that in our universe there is an actual space between each stimulus and response. In human relations the space between a stimulus (being insulted) and a response (returning the insult or remaining quiet) is our “greatest power – the freedom to choose.” That space allows us to choose a response based on our emotions or a response based on our values.

Covey says, “As human beings we are responsible for our own lives. Our behavior is a function of our decisions, not our conditions.  We can subordinate feelings to values”.  .  .  . [Our behavior can be] “a product of our own conscious choice, based on values, rather than a product of our conditions, based on feeling.”

Christians can act from our false narratives and/or our cultural conditioning or we can act from our training to live by the example and words of Jesus.  Jesus says, “Do to others as you would have them do unto you” (Luke 6:31: NIV) and “the last will be first, and the first will be last” (Matt. 20:15) and “Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends” (John 15:13; NIV).  We are in training to become more like Jesus.  If we give ourselves the space of grace, we can act and speak from a Christ-centered place!