My Mom Died

This morning I received a call from my brother, Terry. It is not usual that I get a call from him, especially in the morning. When I saw his name on the caller ID, I thought I was in for news about Mom. I thought she might have died; I thought something might have happened and she had been taken to the hospital. I was right.

The nursing center had just called him to say that our mother had passed from this life. She had been declining substantially in her mental functions in recent weeks. So I was not surprised.

I called my sister to inform her. She had the same experience as I; seeing my name on the caller ID, she was braced for what I had to tell her.

We both took the news well, at least initially. I shed some tears an hour or so later, after talking with Mom's nurse. She assured me that Mom had had a pleasant morning, ate a nice breakfast and slipped away peacefully between 10:30 and 11:00 after finishing her mid-morning snack. It was just exactly what I have prayed for, that she would go quickly and peacefully.

Thank you Jesus for my Mom and the hope I have of seeing her again - but in perfect health next time. I hold onto this hope, not just a hope of seeing my mother again, but seeing her fully healthy and fully satisfied.

My mom had a decent life in America, but a life of struggle. My dad was not a good husband, to say the least. After divorcing him, she never remarried. Though she loved her children dearly, we were busy with our own family lives in adulthood. I'm sure she battled a lot of loneliness. She struggled with health issues of various kinds. At least a couple of decades ago, she had a viral infection that destroyed her sense of smell. This largely impaired her enjoyment of food. Her brain had been deteriorating in recent years - short-term memory almost non-existent for the past two years. Thankfully, she knew us kids to the end, though she could hardly communicate in recent weeks. So, my hope is that Mom is in that place where she is whole and there is no distraction from the joy of Life.

My Sister Died

A week ago I received a call from a brother that Myrna was in the hospital and not expected to live long, a few days at best. She had had a heart attack and doctors were not able to help her beyond keeping her comfortable. Myrna was my half-sister, my dad’s only daughter by his first wife. She was his firstborn, born in 1934. She didn’t quite make it to her 78th birthday, later this month.

My sister’s death is a strange experience for me, hard for others to understand, hard for me to explain. I am saddened by the loss. Whenever I make a trip to California again, I won’t get to see her. Because we have both trusted Jesus as our Savior, I will get to see her again. This second truth is the more important truth, of course; but it does not eliminate that first truth.

In Dad’s first marriage, he had Myrna and four sons. I’m not really sure how long that marriage lasted – at least long enough to have five children. Dad’s drinking and abusive ways had to have been strong contributors to the demise of that marriage.

My mom was a young single-parent, raising her son without the help of his father. Mom was a very attractive woman. Dad was a handsome man who could be as charming as he was abusive. I doubt Dad was single very long before he and Mom got hitched.

There were already six children between them. I’m sure Dad was not interested in begetting more kids – but he did. Two of us. Me and then my little sister, three years later.

Dad was not a good husband to either of these wives. Neither was he a good dad to any of the seven children who knew him as Dad.

Divorce back in the early ‘40’s was not like it is today. There was considerable shame attached. It was a family secret. Family secrets are sometimes hard to keep with children. So this secret was kept in my family by not providing me information that I might pass along to neighborhood friends.

When we would go visit Dad’s kids or they would visit us, I didn’t know – until I was at least 10 – that they were my siblings. These visits only happened when the oldest two siblings, Myrna and Burel were young married adults. Perhaps we visited them earlier, but I have no memory of that. My guess is that Dad visited them without us present until this point.

When these visits happened, I had no sense that these were my siblings. I don’t know what I thought the relationships were.

Because there was substantial age difference between me and them, I wound up pretty uninvolved. I would just play with my younger sister while the adults visited. I remembered liking Myrna and Burel. I don’t remember much about Myrna’s first husband (the only one I knew). I remember thinking how beautiful Myrna and Burel’s wife were. Well, I was a boy. And I remember arguments that would almost always erupt between my Dad and Burel.

Through my young adult life I had no contact with my half-siblings. We had no effective bonding that drew us to want to connect. That was the way it was for me until 1986, the year our Dad died. In the wake of his passing, Burel reached out to me via mail. He wrote me a lengthy letter, telling me about his life and family and requested that I reciprocate. I did. Then he encouraged me to come for a visit the next time I returned to Indiana. Another brother, Arlis, lived in the area. So we made that happen a year or two after Dad died. Myrna had moved to California as had my sister, Diane.

It is impossible to explain what happened inside me at that time. I found myself drawn to Burel and his family. I wanted to get to know them. We shared blood. We had all been hurt by the same man. Our times together were not about those hurts – it was about discovering gifts, each other.

I have not had the opportunity to build relationship with the two younger brothers. They moved off to other states, too. Myrna and I have corresponded in those years since Dad’s passing. I have kept up with her through Burel and Diane, too.

I talked about my two sisters in California. That is a fascinating story. Both of them moved to San Diego without the other’s knowledge. They went to work at the very same company. One day, my sister saw Myrna’s name on a time card in the rack. She intended to meet the lady, just to tell her that she has a sister by the very same name. Major surprise for both when they did meet!

For the past 40 years or so they have lived in the same area and have had more contact and bonding as a result.

Myrna’s passing has been very hard on Diane. She will naturally feel the loss more intensely than I. Some of what I feel is the sadness for her and for Burel and for Arlis. I know Burel and Arlis must be feeling what I would feel if Diane had died. I would want no one to think that I don’t have my own feelings of loss; I do. They are just mixed in with feeling sympathy for those who feel this loss even more intensely than I.

I look forward to the great family reunion we shall have on the other side.

Lin-sanity and Insanity

If you are not a pro-basketball fan, you may not be aware of who Jeremy Lin is. Well, maybe you would have to not be a sports fan at all. Jeremy Lin is the shooting star of the New York Knicks, whose rise to stardom happened just this month.

Lin is a six-foot, three inch pro-basketball player who has an Asian heritage. Though he was born in America, his parents emigrated here from Taiwan in the 1970’s. His facial features quite readily reveal his ancestry; his height does not. Both of his parents are only five-foot, six inches tall.

Though he has been a talented basketball player, he has not been viewed as a great basketball player. He has spent most of his professional basketball career in the development league. Even when being acquired by the Knicks, he was not considered a starter, but a good addition to the depth of their bench. But then, in a series of games where he played quite impressively, he gained and has maintained a starting slot with the Knicks. After putting up a game-winning, three-pointer against the Toronto Raptors on Valentine’s Day, another pro-basketball player began running around shouting “Lin-sanity!”. The term has stuck. It’s official. Court battles over the ownership of the term now rage.

That is Lin-sanity. Now I want to talk about the Insanity attached to this. The Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream company put out an ice cream flavor they named Lin-sanity. One of the ingredients was broken up pieces of fortune cookies. A few people complained to the company that this was racially insensitive, so they removed the fortune cookies and have given broken up waffle cone pieces on the side to appease the complainers.

Of course, the company denies that the complaints were the reason for the recipe change. They said that the fortune cookies got soggy in the ice cream. Well, MAYBE. I am betting that they caved to political correctness gone wild. To be sure, our insane world contains many racially prejudiced, racially insensitive people, but it most certainly has as many who are racially overly-sensitive.

On MLK Day, I had a personal experience with this. That day I posted on Facebook what was supposed to be a bit of dry humor. I predicted that there would be no bank robberies in Tulsa that day. All that was in my mind was, there would be no bank robberies because no banks were open on the holiday. This innocent post, however, turned into a firestorm of controversy in which it was stated or implied that I was racially insensitive at best and perhaps a real racist at worst for making such a post. I suppose I should have waited to make the post on President’s Day, but I am so un-racist as to even imagine someone would make the illogical leap that my post was racial in any way.

Since the dismaying conflict of that day, the man who originally wrongly interpreted my post and attacked me, apologized. Sincerely apologized. I have forgiven all that, yet it stands as a very personal reminder that racism is quite alive in my world and it is a quite complex issue. It is absolutely not a concept restricted to white people holding bad attitudes toward white people.

I think, if I had been in charge of Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream Company, I would have been even more determined to keep the fortune cookies in the recipe. If the fortune cookies becoming "soggy" was a real issue, I would have told my workers to figure out how to solve that problem. And to anyone who called or wrote in protest of the fortune cookies, I would have this simple message: Get a freakin’ life!

Tongue Control and Finger Control

In his little letter to the Christians in the 1st Century, the Apostle James had some potent things to say about “tongue control”. What James said then was probably sufficient for the most part. Though written communication had existed for a very long time then, it was much more of a laborious task to write than we think of in our modern day. Back then, most communication between people was verbal. But, times have been changing ever since. And in my lifetime, things have changed drastically.

In the middle of the 15th Century, moveable type printing machines were created for use with western languages. This multiplied the potential to mass-produce written messages for distribution. A mechanical typewriter was first marketed in the 1870’s. In the 1930’s, IBM marketed an electric typewriter, mostly used in business settings. In the mid 1960’s, IBM marketed a new innovation, the Magnetic Tape Selectric Typewriter, which provided a memory of the typing so that corrections could be made without having to re-type an entire document. In the early ’70’s, word processors began to be created to utilize the power of computers. Today, we have very powerful and very fast computers with very powerful word processing programs. Beyond this, cell phones and other portable devices allow us to communicate with others verbally and in print at exceptional speeds.

It seems we are able to communicate faster than we can think in this modern world. At least, a lot of stuff I see posted online (Facebook, etc.) doesn’t seem to have been very well thought out before being blurted out.

Before I go on, let’s look at what James had to say about the tongue.

“We all stumble in many ways. If anyone is never at fault in what he says, he is a perfect man, able to keep his whole body in check. When we put bits into the mouths of horses to make them obey us, we can turn the whole animal. Or take ships as an example. Although they are so large and are driven by strong winds, they are steered by a very small rudder wherever the pilot wants to go. Likewise the tongue is a small part of the body, but it makes great boasts. Consider what a great forest is set on fire by a small spark. The tongue also is a fire, a world of evil among the parts of the body. It corrupts the whole person, sets the whole course of his life on fire, and is itself set on fire by hell.

"All kinds of animals, birds, reptiles and creatures of the sea are being tamed and have been tamed by man, but no man can tame the tongue. It is a restless evil, full of deadly poison. With the tongue we praise our Lord and Father, and with it we curse men, who have been made in God’s likeness. Out of the same mouth come praise and cursing. My brothers, this should not be.” (James 3:2-10)

I suggest that we all think about this. Perhaps finger control is needed today as much as tongue control ever was. Let us think about what we are communicating, the appropriateness of our words – not only when we speak, but when we tweet, text, email, post comments on Facebook, etc. Personally, I see so much stuff posted on Facebook that it inappropriate, out-of-line, and damaging.

Recently, an offended dad posted a video online in response to his daughter’s disrespectful Facebook post about her family. The father’s video has been viewed more than 20 million times on Youtube. He talked to his daughter in a very stern manner about her disrespect and ingratitude. He had recently invested $130 in upgrading her laptop computer, and he was incensed that she would publicly complain about her life. He was also justly repulsed that several of her "friends" had clicked “like” to her grossly disrespectful comment. He ended his powerful rebuke by pulling out his 45 cal pistol and shooting nine rounds into her laptop. (This was filmed outside, of course.)

Though I wouldn’t recommend the Dad’s approach, I must admit I enjoyed it and hoped that a lot of young people would be inspired to think about what they post before they post it. When I was growing up, I probably complained about my home-life to a friend or two here and there. What would have been a pretty private conversation out in my yard or on the playground back in my day, winds up being a notification to literally hundreds of “friends” via a Facebook post today. So, I would encourage all of us to cautiously control our tongues, but just as cautiously control our fingers.

Richard Roberts Arrested!

I woke up to this sad news this morning: “Richard Roberts, former president of Oral Roberts University, is in Tulsa County Jail charged with DUI.” He was originally pulled over by a highway patrolman for driving in excess of 90 mph in a 65 mph zone. The smell of alcohol on Mr. Roberts led to sobriety tests on the spot which he failed. After being taken into custody, a breathalyzer test registered .11% alcohol; .08% is considered drunk in Oklahoma; .10% is considered drunk in every state. Just after midnight last night he was booked into Tulsa County Jail.

As an ORU graduate, I am very thankful for the education I received there. Of course, I remember taking the required course on “Being filled with the spirits and testing God’s protection by racing your car around town”. That is a joke, of course; no such course exists. Not even a hint of such teaching could be found at the university. I do fear that many will use Richard’s failure as a reason to attack the university. And some of those attacks will probably be as ridiculous as suggesting that such a course is part of the ORU curriculum.

Richard Roberts has his problems – legal and otherwise. He has had problems in the past; hence, he is the past president of ORU. This need not, however, become an occasion to attack the Roberts family, the university, Christians in general, or Charismatic Christians in particular. It really ought not be an occasion to attack Richard Roberts either. He obviously has problems and needs prayer. For the record, he and his family have mine.

Courageous- A Movie Recommendation

I didn't wait till it played the dollar theater on purpose. I've been busy. When I saw the first trailer for Courageous, I intended to see the movie. I expected it to be good, just not quite this good.

Yesterday, my wife and I went to see this movie. It easily gets a place among the best movies I have ever seen. In a day when families fall apart more often than they stay together, in a day when too many children grow up without the benefit of an involved, loving father, the message of this movie is so needed.

I want to publicly thank the people responsible for creating this movie. God bless you. And I want to encourage every man to go watch this movie - if for no other reason than you can passionately encourage other men to see it. And if you are a father still raising your kids, please make watching this movie a priority. I can't imagine that something in this movie wouldn't speak to your heart - powerfully speak to your heart. I plan to include this DVD in my library to loan.

Are You a Teacher?

This morning, as our lead pastor (Brian Jennings) preached his New Year message, he asked us this question: "How many of you here are teachers?" Several of us raised our hands immediately. Now, before I go on, let me ask you, "Would you have raised your hand?"

Brian assessed the relatively low number of hands in response to his question. Then he said he thought we must not have understood him; so he asked again how many of us were teachers. Several more hands went up this time. Stating again that we must not be understanding him, he asked once more, "How many of you are teachers?" Most hands in the auditorium went up this time. Then Brian affirmed the truth that all of us are teachers; we all are teaching other people by our words or by our actions. Even children are teachers. They do learn from one another, and not always good and right things.

We would all do well to remember that all education does not take place in a formal pedagogical setting. Actually, most education does not take place in these settings. We are potentially learning from others constantly. We see someone do something and conclude that that is the way to handle a given situation. We reason "that is what everyone else is doing", so it is acceptable for me to do.

I need to remember that someone may be watching me, listening to me, when I don't even realize it. And, as they watch and listen, they may be learning lessons that are detrimental to them and a shame to me that I was their teacher. It is worth contemplating your role as a teacher. May we all be better learners and better teachers in 2012.