The Good Portion

We woke up yesterday* to a wrong-colored world and a dark cloud that looked like the coming apocalypse. It happened so fast. Before I even left for work I’d gotten word that friends’ houses were burning and everyone we knew in the town of Paradise was evacuating. I drove to work under a strange sky and ominous cloud. All day we relayed messages, waited, and prayed for people who were trapped at home or trapped in evacuation traffic. We fielded harrowing phone calls, e mails, text and Facebook messages. By evening all those we knew were safe and accounted for. But by evening the fire was reaching for Chico, and Paul and I began our own evacuation preparations, just in case. We valued and de-valued our possessions and were surprised at what did and didn’t make the cut. We decided to sleep in shifts. Paul slept on the couch for a couple of hours. Then I climbed, fully clothed, into bed for my shift. I’ve battled insomnia off and on for the last four years. Times like this are not

 “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son,  that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.” John 3:16 Time for true confessions. When you recognized the familiar verse above, did you slow down to treasure it, or did you breeze through it to get to the article? I hope you slowed down. But if you didn’t, you’re not alone. I memorized John 3:16 when I was a little girl in Sunday school, and I’ve breezed through it ever since. Even so, it was this Sunday school doctrine of God’s love that kept the door to repentance propped open until the day I got saved at age forty. If I’d never heard that God loved the world, I would never have had the courage to run to Him with my truckload of sin and shame. Once I did, I was so overjoyed by his love and acceptance that I wanted to share it with the world. I told anyone who would listen. I made my way back to church and drank up whatever I could about the God I now loved. I learned about his many attribut

One of the exciting things about being a little Lutheran girl was getting to be an acolyte. I got to wear a white robe, carry a candle, and walk in procession to the altar to the music of the massive pipe organ. Once in front, I carefully lit the candles behind the altar, or at least I think I lit them. (I don’t really remember that part.) What I clearly remember is that after singing hymns, chanting Psalms, and hearing the Scriptures read and taught, at the close of the service I would take a long-handled brass snuffer and carefully snuff out the flames of those candles. After all the people left, I would return the white robe to a hidden room, join my parents outside, and return to life in the real world. In Luke 8, when Jesus explains the meaning of the Parable of the Sower for his disciples, he adds a statement which I always considered a strange non-sequitur: “No one after lighting a lamp covers it with a jar or puts it under a bed, but puts it on a stand, so that those who en

“A sower went out to sow his seed. And as he sowed, some fell along the path and was trampled underfoot, and the birds of the air devoured it. And some fell on the rock, and as it grew up, it withered away, because it had no moisture. And some fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up with it and choked it. And some fell into good soil and grew and yielded a hundredfold.” Lk 8.5-8a I’ve always associated the Parable of the Sower with evangelism: when people hear the gospel it goes one of four ways. This made sense to me, since I heard the gospel for four decades without it ever taking root and bearing fruit in my life. But the other day, these words popped into my head, and I suddenly realized the parable applies to much more than evangelism: “The seed is the word of God.” (Lk. 8.11b) This parable is for every one of us, every day. Every time God’s word is read, preached, or remembered, the sower is sowing his seed. Everyone who hears is the soil. And every time we hear, the

When I met him I was eighteen years old sitting with my mother in a television studio watching her favorite Christian program being broadcast live. I had just graduated from high school and was not sure what direction my life was going to take. I was raised Lutheran and went to Lutheran schools. For nine years I not only attended church and Sunday school, but I was required to take religion classes at school and attend chapel weekly. By the tenth grade, however, not long after my first communion, my mother gave up making me go to church. During my senior year, though, I was invited to a different kind of church. Their passionate worship and preaching moved me to tears. I would later learn that their teachings were false, but their enthusiasm for the Bible got me going to church and reading the Bible of my own free will for the first time in my life. Weeks later, hand pressed against the hand of an evangelist on the TV screen, my mother prayed her own way into this new kind of

It was her childhood home, the place where she married her husband and gave birth to two sons. After ten years away, she was back in Bethlehem of Judah, with nothing but a young foreign woman at her side. The townspeople struggled to put a name to her changed face. Her name was Pleasant, Naomi, in Hebrew. The sound of it alone made people smile. If names were prophetic, hers was a blessing. But now, here in Bethlehem, after all these years, and after everything she had lost, her name sounded like a cruel joke.  She begged them, “Do not call me Naomi; call me Mara, for the Almighty has dealt very bitterly with me. I went away full, and the LORD has brought me back empty.” Ruth 1.21-22a In those days, judges ruled Israel and the people did whatever seemed right in their own eyes. When the people turned their backs on God, He would bring war or famine until they cried out to Him again. During one such famine Naomi's husband took his family to sojourn in Moab, the land of their

I’ll admit that 2017 has not been one of my favorite years. This year we struggled through months of grueling heat, insect infestations, neighborhood deterioration, political upheaval, an empty nest, anxiety, and crippling discouragement. But it was also the year of my 10th Anniversary trip with my wonderful husband, Paul. We toured Hearst Castle, as we did on our honeymoon. We fell in love with a little village called Cambria. We stayed in Koreatown, feasted on Greek, Oaxacan, and Georgian food, and feasted our eyes on all the great art we could find at the Crocker, the Huntington Library, and our happy place, the Getty Center.  It was also the year Paul began a job that has changed his life for the better, the year he took up watercolors and became an artist, the year I sold my first artwork since I was in my 20's, and the year that forged a few new friendships that will likely last for the duration of our lives. Too often, I would say, we look for big miracles as proo