Maria Keffler's Blog, page 3

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When I did my student teaching practicum in 1993 my supervising teacher at the high school told me that she saw a shift in kids’ behavior in the 1970’s, specifically with respect to how they talked. The explosion of television sit-coms (Happy Days, Sanford & Son, All in the Family) seemed to have changed how people viewed and expressed humor. “Everything became about the sarcastic retort, the one-liner, and one-upmanship,” she told me. “They’re much more disrespectful with each other, and with adults.”Given the breakdown of public discourse—when was the last time you had a contra-partisan conversation on social media that didn’t devolve into name-calling within two or three exchanges?—it seems my mentor may have been onto something.Television is, at its core, about ratings and profits. The larger a show’s audience, the more it can charge for advertising spots. And frankly, morality and good behavior don’t sell. Jerry Springer, Sally Jessy Raphael, & Geraldo didn’t build their talk show empires with segments on financial advice, car maintenance, or cute animal tricks. They exploited angry exes, homosexual strippers, self-mutilation, and bestiality, to list the first few topics that came up when I Googled “Jerry Springer”.We’ve sensationalized and celebrated the very worst in humanity and called it humor, education, news.Does art imitate life, or does life imitate art? (The term “art” is used here very, very loosely.)How did we end up with a thrice-married, five-times-bankrupt, reality TV personality in the White House? Because “he tells it like it is!” and he “fights back!” and he “stands for what we stand for!”? Right. No. We scooped him out of the tabloid talk shows and made him our king. He’s the poster boy for everything television studio audiences want to see: lewdness, loudness, and hostility.If you disagree, then do your own research. Next time you’re consuming some media (watching TV, reading a magazine, or browsing your social media feed), ask yourself what the thing you’re seeing is trying to sell you. Right now I’m trying to sell you the idea that we’ve been duped into believing that what we see on TV is real life, that that’s how we are and how we ought to be.The jewelry ad that promises, “Make her fall in love with you all over again” is trying to sell you hope that your marriage will get fixed if you just buy your wife some bling. The Instagram friend who posts a photo of her cherubic toddlers mixing up cookies in a kitchen that looks like the set from a Crate and Barrel catalog shoot is trying to sell you a particular image of herself. Those click-bait List-of-35-Whatever social media posts are trying to sell you whatever you’re willing to click on so they can get kickbacks from the 872 ads they’ve mingled in with their content till you can hardly tell which is which.What are television shows trying to sell you? While they’ve all got an implicit worldview (Star Trek, for example, espouses a lot of Bahá'í philosophy), for the most part they’re not selling you anything. They’re actually selling you. Your presence in front of the screen ups their ratings numbers so they can feed you to the ad agencies, who want to siphon off your cash. Same thing with Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat. You are the commodity that the advertisers are buying.If that doesn’t bother us, we’re probably not giving it enough thought.Which is probably why we are where we are.
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Farewell, Freddy

Our neighbor’s dog Freddy died this week.Freddy has lived in this neighborhood longer than we have. He may have been the first doggo to bark at me after we moved in back in 2007. You couldn’t walk past Fred’s house, if he was outside, without getting barked at. He’d give one solitary Woof, to let you know he considered it rude if you strolled by without stopping to give him a pat and a scratch.His parents called him The Mayor, and that seems to be just how he saw himself.My two older kids have a dog-walking job for the lady who lives three houses down. Her two dogs were friends with Freddy—rumor has it he considered one of them his girlfriend—so he often came out of his garage to rub noses and sniff behinds with Robie and Hovey. When they went out of town, Fred’s parents even hired my kids to dog-sit a couple of times. Fred had a complicated meal structure, and didn’t much like to walk when you wanted him to. It was a good exercise for my kids in managing a schedule, serving a demanding eater, and dealing with a smallish, recalcitrant being. You know, parenting.Several of my kids’ friends in the neighborhood walk and sit various dogs at various times. I’d often see Ryan on the way to care for Fred or Nena, or Andrew coming down the street for the afternoon shift with Robie and Hovey. Ryan’s older sister Casey used to dog-walk too, but now she’s a senior in high school, showing and riding horses, working on plays and singing in the choir, dating, and getting ready to leave for college next fall.One by one these kids will leave the neighborhood.Oh, Freddy.That dog redeemed the name Fred for me. My first serious boyfriend in college was named Fred. He led me to believe we were going to get married.He led a number of girls to believe that.When I met Freddy the dog, I thought he had the most unfortunate name, and because of that I thought I could never come to love him.But I was wrong.Many, many a morning I stopped to talk to Fred and his mom on my way back from taking one or more of my kids to the bus. This year, however, my youngest is in fifth grade, and her school is right around the corner, and she made patrol captain, so there is no way she’s going to let her mother accompany her to school. I’ve had bus duty morning and afternoon for the past eleven years.Now I don’t.So I didn’t see Freddy much this fall. I wasn’t out and about like I used to be.My son came home from his morning dog-walk a few days ago and said that Fred’s parents didn’t expect him to live more than another day or two. They were right.The neighborhood won’t be the same without you, Freddy.It won’t be the same without Casey.Or Andrew and Ryan.Or my kids.I really wish you didn’t all have to go.

What Did I Do Wrong?

One of my kids is making some choices that align with the brokenness of the world rather than the wholeness of Truth. It’s breaking my heart, knowing that this chosen path, if pursued much further, leads to no good end. In my prayer time the other day I cried out to God, “What did I do wrong?”He responded, with purest empathy, “What did I do wrong?”We believe, as parents, that if we get it all right—send our kids to the right schools, pray the right scriptures, keep the bad stuff out and immerse our homes in the good stuff—we’ll erect a barrier around our children that will prevent them from ever straying from the good path. We love them, and give them all the truth and benefits we’re able, and deep down we really believe we have the power to protect them from themselves and from the world.When someone else’s kid goes off the rails, drowns in a swimming pool, or climbs into the gorilla cage, the first thing the rest of us usually do is point fingers at the parents and say (if only in the silent, terrified pride of our own minds) that they somehow dropped the ball. We’d never let that happen to our kid.I’m guilty of finger-pointing: What did you do to make your child turn to alcohol, get pregnant as a teenager, bully, shoplift, self-cut, shoot heroin, etc., etc.? Because I want to believe that I can make my kids be healthy, safe, and wise. That if I get it right, they’ll never be tempted to go wrong.But it’s not true.What did I do wrong? More than a few things.What did God do wrong? Not a single thing.He’s the perfect parent, the limitless provider, the wisest counselor. He’s never screwed up with a single one of us.But I…I traveled a labyrinth of dark trails between the time my parents’ control over me waned and I finally capitulated to God’s. Oh, I sinned. Why? Not because God’s love wasn’t good enough, but because my heart is dark, and my mind is conflicted, and my emotions are chaotic. I think I know what I’m doing all the time, but my own highest wisdom is laughable compared to God’s greatest foolishness.My children all have that same agency. Every day they move further away from their father’s and my jurisdiction and closer to the end goal of being fully in charge of the management of their own lives. This is right, and the way it’s meant to be: children grow up and grow away.And I can’t control their outcomes.I’m butting heads with that truth right now. I can’t control this child. I can’t force insight, oblige wisdom, or coerce understanding. I still have power to enact consequences for behavior—thank God—but I have no power to govern my child’s heart. I never did. I never will.This thing may be my fault. But it probably isn’t.In the end, all of us have to negotiate the status of our own souls. We’ll stand alone, and account for what we chose and why.All I can do is pray that God makes up for the ways I’ve screwed up parenting.And I’ll hold onto the truth that he, in his perfection, loves this child even more than I do.Right now that’s all I have.
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I Ran My First 5K! OK, No I Didn't.

Minutes before the first race I’d ever run, as the man in charge pointed to the wooden campground map and explained the tortuous path and sketchy terrain we would have to navigate, I whispered to my thirteen-year-old daughter. “I only see one or two other women who look like they’re in better shape than we are.” I also figured that at least a third of the twenty-five or thirty people running the Fall Festival 5K would probably walk it as a nice afternoon stroll through the woods.Then the organizer yelled, “Ready… Set… Go!” and every single person there—including my own child—sprinted off the starting line, zipped down the paved path into the woods, and left me in a wake of dust.I’m pacing myself, I reasoned wisely. These are clearly inexperienced fools who will burn themselves out after the first half mile, and I will calmly pass them one by one, like the proverbial plodding tortoise whose steady relentlessness takes the day.After about a K and a half I finally got past the five-year-old who repeatedly whined to his dad, “We’re almost done, right?”By the time I caught sight of my daughter again I’d revised my race goals from “Place at least third” to “Cross the finish line unassisted.”As I approached my child she glanced back over her shoulder, saw that the footfalls she heard were mine, and broke into a fevered sprint. “I’m not letting my 49-year-old mother beat me!” she bellowed up into the trees.I am going to get ahead of her and stay ahead of her and beat her snotty little carcass to the finish line if it’s the last thing I do in this mortal life, I resolved.I ran flat-out to catch her, then she ran flat-out to stay ahead of me, then I slowed down, then she slowed down, then I ran flat-out to catch her, then she ran flat-out…After we performed that combative pas de deux five times I called ahead to her. “Look, I promise I’ll let you come in ahead of me. Just wait for me and let’s do this together.”“Why?” she called back suspiciously.“Because it’s more fun to be together and enjoy each other’s company.”“You sound like a Disney movie,” she sneered, but agreed to my terms.At the second water stop we each chugged a bottle and I asked the woman stationed there if we were about half way. I hoped she’d say, “three-quarters,” or “four-fifths,” but she nodded. “Yep. Half.”$#*@!%, I thought.We took off again and shortly came to a fork in the path.An unmarked fork.We stopped and tried to remember what the map looked like. “Are we supposed to go left or right here?” my daughter asked.I have the navigational abilities of a blindfolded dyslexic with a memory-impairment disorder. “You’re asking me ?”“Oh, right. Let’s go this way.”Before long we came to another unmarked fork. And buildings. And a mom pushing a stroller toward a playground.We heard cheering, turned toward the sound, and saw the finish line.“Come on!” my daughter yelled and took off toward the ticking marquis clock. “We’re under forty minutes!”Wow, that last half went really fast, I thought.People lined the final, paved stretch of the race and applauded as we crossed the line.Hang on a minute…“I think we made a bad turn,” I told my daughter.We consulted the man in charge of the race and looked at the map. “I think we went wrong after the second water stop,” I said.“Did you go right or left there?” he asked.“Left.”“You should’ve gone right.”We’d clipped nearly half the track with our unintentional short-cut.I told him we’d have to disqualify ourselves because it wasn’t fair for us to get any of the top three prizes when we’d run less than 3K.“Don’t worry about it,” he said. “We’ve already awarded the top three.”There needs to be a slack-jawed Emoji eating crow with a fuchsia blush of humiliation in its cheeks. Some of those people I’d disparaged as so far beneath my fitness level had finished a full 5K in less time than it took me to do 2.5.The jury’s still out on what I learned from this. I’ve been working on my critical spirit for several decades now, but I’m not sure it’s waned one judgy little iota. I hoped maybe by entering a race I’d find my inner FloJo and get that runner’s high I’ve heard about but have yet to experience in the six or so years I’ve been forcing myself to do this tedious and painful activity. But that’s still a nope.Maybe what I learned is I did the best I could, and so did everybody else, and sometimes that’s all it takes to call yourself a success.Yeah, I’m going with that.

My #MeToo

My husband and I were talking about the Kavanaugh hearings when I asserted that if I took a poll of all the women I know who are around my age (pushing fifty), I’m willing to bet that more of us have been sexually assaulted and/or date raped than not. I added that, gratefully, I am one who has not.Then I remembered an incident my freshman year of college that would qualify, by the strictest definition, as sexual assault. My female friend and I were studying with a classmate of hers in his dorm room. We all started getting silly and pretty soon the three of us were tickling, pushing, and wrestling. Then the guy pinched my right nipple.I remember vividly which nipple it was, because even as I recount this humiliating experience, I can still feel his fingers close on it.The incident ended when I slapped him across the face—to which he made a snide remark—and then I left.When I began to tell my husband this story, here’s what I heard myself say:“There was this one thing that happened, but it was really stupid of me to have put myself in the situation that I did.”I blamed… myself.A guy I hardly knew, who maybe hoped he was about to get a threesome, chose to grope a sensitive and private part of a body whose owner he hardly knew, rather than exercise any other possible option. He might’ve tried to kiss one of us if he genuinely thought the evening was going that way. Or he could’ve simply asked if we were interested in a romp. But instead, his first impulse was to go after the nearest boob.I never told anyone about that evening until I sat across the dinner table with my husband thirty-some years later, both because it seemed trivial compared to what other women I knew had suffered, and I figured anyone I told would say something like:It doesn’t sound like you were there to study.What did you expect, when you started wrestling with him?You’re lucky you weren’t alone with him.(That last one’s probably very true.)I doubt if that guy has any memory of this incident. I’m sure it was no big deal to him, except that he didn’t get what he was hoping for that night.But today, I’m less angry that he honked me than I am that I took responsibility for it. And I’m angry that he got away with nothing more than a slap on the cheek and some sexual frustration. And I’m disappointed that some people will read this and still think it was my fault, that it was no big deal, that boys will be boys, that I got what I deserved for being young and stupid and there.This has always been and still is a country where men can do what they like to women, with little consequence, in my and many of my female friends’ experience. And I’m as guilty as anyone for letting it continue to be that way.

"Alexa, Parent For Me"

I’m turning over parenting responsibilities to my Echo device.Our home now holds two teenagers, as well as a ten-year-old with the alpha tendencies of a firstborn, the verbal and negotiation skills of a middle child, and the entitlement outlook of the tiny baby princess. I can no longer speak words to anyone here and expect a pleasant—or even a benign—response. A simple “Good morning,” might get me steely eyes, snarled lips, and “Whatever.”Recently, in the waiting room at the dentist’s office, I thanked my oldest for liking one of my Instagram posts. He hunched down in his chair, darted his eyes right and left in a furtive scan of the room, and hissed, “Geez, Mom! Come on!”“What?” I asked.“That’s so embarrassing!”

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But I’ve discovered that they’ll take anything if it comes from Alexa. Her voice is that of the worshipful empress and her orders are un-disobeyable. She’s the fount of all wisdom, the go-to for all questions and insights, and the matriarch who awaits a summons to action with the silent, immutable presence of a Zen monk.You know, all the stuff Mom is supposed to be.Anyway, I loaded her up with reminders that she announces on schedule:7:00am – “Firstborn, walk the dogs.”7:15am – “Middle, pack your lunch.”7:30am – “Baby Girl, put on your shoes and go to school.”Not one child ever squabbles against these dictates or argues with the Alexa.Surely they must know that their annoying, needlessly overprotective, and profoundly clueless mother entered these instructions into the device?Why is the messenger’s voice so much more palatable than the dispatcher’s?We purchased Echo Dots for the kids’ bedrooms. (Yeah, yeah, privacy, Big Brother, yadda yadda. Sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do.) The kids use their devices to set alarms, listen to their hideous music, and find out what the weather’s going to be like so they can beg for a ride to school if it’s going to be too rainy, too hot, too dry, too cold, or too all-around weather-y.But even better, all the Echoes can talk to each other: Mom : Alexa, drop in on the girls’ bedroom. Girls! Stop talking and go to bed. Girls : (Yelling, fighting, blaming, claiming they were already asleep, yelling some more…)Mom hangs up and enters a new Reminder in the Girls’ Echo Dot. Girls’ Echo Dot : Girls. Stop talking and go to bed.The bedroom falls silent.The children like Alexa better than they like me. I want to say, “Yeah, well, Alexa didn’t push with pain and blood and sweat and tears your nine-pound-plus carcasses out of her bleeding uterus, you ungrateful little rug rats.”But they’re far too big to be called rug rats anymore.So I’m just going to roll with it: Kid : Mom! What’s for dinner? (Refer child to Alexa.) Alexa : Here’s a recipe for Mac N’ Cheese.I’m not sure I’m even a necessary presence in the house anymore, to be honest. Kid : Mom! I don’t remember the Pythagorean theorem! (Refer child to Alexa.) Alexa : For all right triangles, A-squared plus B-squared equals C-squared.In fact, I’m thinking about leaving, and seeing how long it takes anyone to notice. Kid : Mom! Where’s my blue skirt? (Refer child to Alexa.) Alexa : I’m sorry, I don’t know that. Maybe if you’d put your things away instead of leaving them all over the house you’d be able to find them when you want them.I’m only dreaming about Alexa saying that last part. Perhaps when AI gets a little more advanced. Or when Alexa gets fifteen years of parenting under her belt, and the children ignore her, and she starts feeling exactly like I do.Kid: Alexa, have you seen my mom anywhere?Alexa: (Enormous sigh of unfettered irritation.) Go ask Siri.
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How to Fix a Puzzle That's Missing a Piece

Finishing a 1000-piece puzzle only to discover one of the tiles has gone missing is a clothes-rending, teeth-gnashing sort of experience. It’s like maintaining first-place in a 26.2 mile marathon only to trip on your shoelaces in the last three meters.At least I’d guess that’s how it feels. If I ever run 26.2 miles in a single stretch you can assume the zombie apocalypse has occurred and I’m fleeing to save my brains.But there’s an easy fix for the puzzle problem: Make your own last piece.No joke. It’s not nearly as hard as you might think, and it doesn’t even have to be perfect for no one to ever realize what you did there.


     First, put a piece of plain paper (cardstock is good for the stiffness) behind your puzzle and trace out the missing piece.


      Cut out your traced piece and you’ll have a blank tile that fits snugly into the hole in your puzzle.


      To build up the thickness so it matches your puzzle’s girth either trace your new piece onto a piece of cardboard, or onto two or three more sheets of cardstock, then glue them on top of each other.

Trace the outline of your blank piece onto the puzzle photo.If your puzzle came with a photo of the finished puzzle, find a spot in that photo that matches your missing piece. The photo is probably smaller than the puzzle, but unless your missing piece is very detailed and central to the visual effect of the finished work, you can fudge this.(If your puzzle did not come with a photo, and the box itself doesn’t offer a good replacement section, simply draw in the missing parts on your new blank piece. Fit the piece into the puzzle, pencil in the design so it lines up with the surrounding pieces, then use markers or paints—or even crayon—to fill in the design as closely to the colors as possible. To approximate the gloss on the puzzle pieces you can lay Scotch or packaging tape over top of your new piece if you don’t have something like Modge Podge handy. Just trim the excess tape and voilà!)

 
      If you’re cutting a piece out of the puzzle photo or box, lay your blank replacement piece over top of the section that best approximates the missing bit. Trace it, cut it out, and glue it to the top of your blank piece.


When I did this with my puzzle I discovered that the color of the photo didn’t quite match the color of the puzzle, and my replacement piece stuck out visually. My artistically gifted daughter suggested glazing over the new piece with some watercolor paints, so I tried that. It worked great. I even painted in a new tree trunk to line up with the surrounding pieces.


We love puzzles in our house. I frame them and hang them up. Every time I look at one I remember when we sat around the table piecing it together as a family.Why let one missing piece ruin all that?Happy fixing!
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The Sermon Was Too Heady

I recently heard someone critique their pastor’s sermons as too heady.SMDH. (I’ll let you look that one up if you don’t already know what it means.)Parishioners frequently serve up roast pastor after church on Sundays, so I think it’s fair enough for this parishioner to indulge in a bite of congregational roast for a change. Today’s Christians are rarely, if ever, critiqued for being too intellectual, thoughtful, or “heady”. Right. We far too often present ourselves as mindless parrots of Bible verses we memorized when our life’s years were in the single digits, while wearing blinders so we don’t have to see things that make us uncomfortable, and rose-colored glasses when we glance in the mirror.We need more heady sermons. We need to spend more time thinking about God and evil and other people, and our relationship to all three, and less time forwarding “Type Amen and Share This Now!” twaddle.It’s way past time we stop drinking from bottles of biblical milk and start consuming scriptural meat. The mature believer’s Bible is not for the fool, the child, or the faint of heart; it’s full of hard truths, challenging mandates, and stuff that even Augustine, St. Teresa, and C. S. Lewis struggled to wrap their mighty heads around. We should find our pastors’ sermons hard. If I’m not squirming in my seat, or taking notes on stuff to look up later, or wondering if the pastor’s been reading my diary, the sermons I’m hearing are too fluffy.God condemned false biblical prophets for telling people what they wanted to hear, instead of what God wanted them to hear. (Prosperity Gospel, anyone?) If I like most of what I’m getting from the pulpit—and not because I’m giving a raised eyebrow to someone I think ought to be paying closer attention—then I’m not getting the gritty truth.No one is good, not one of us. If Sunday mornings leave me I’m feeling like I’m pretty okay, my pastor isn’t doing his job well enough. We’re often laughable, and we often deserve to be laughed at. People don’t take Christian’s words and opinions seriously because mainstream Christians in America today don’t really seem to take Christ that seriously. That “do unto others” thing—he meant that. When Jesus said “Test the spirits” he wasn’t talking about bourbon or whisky. When he called out hypocrites over and over and over again during his Sermon on the Mount, he had our numbers.He still does. Our walk doesn’t live up to our talk.For example, we tell the world that people can’t marry someone of the same gender because marriage is a sacred thing between a man and a woman. But marriage inside the church doesn’t look very different from marriage à lathe world, at least with respect to divorce and extramarital sex. And according to Jesus if I even look lustfully at someone, I’ve committed adultery with that person already.Where’s this “sanctity of marriage”, then? Where do we get off trying to make anyone outside the church live by our rules, when we don’t even live by our own rules? How about we clean the house we live in before we start clucking tongues at the dirt in other people’s? We should be living at odds a lot more often than we are. When we call ourselves Christians quite a few of us are just riding on the coattails of 200+ years of living comfortably as part of the majority culture. But today, as our culture departs from traditional values by leaps, bounds, and pole vaults, we shouldn’t expect to fit in or ride lazily on the current anymore. If we’re striving to live out Christ’s example, we should more and more frequently be at odds with society and with our baser selves.Pastors are called to teach us truth about God (and ourselves) with the goal of helping us become more like him and less what our flesh, the world, and Satan want us to be. We can’t be transformed without the renewing of our minds, and to be renewed they have to be engaged. Learning is hard work. Growing is painful. Change is difficult.If we want to hear peppy things that make us feel good about ourselves, there’s no shortage of self-help gurus and internet memes that’ll give us all the easy strokes we crave. But if we’re serious about becoming Christ-like, and serving him in a world that’s hostile to his message, it’s time we rolled up our sleeves and got down to work.I’ll take all the heady sermons I can get, thanks.
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Please Don't Kill My Kid

Hey. Can I show you something? Grab your phone. It’s within twelve inches of your hand, isn’t it? Now take a look at your last three texts. I’ll wait…Oh, here are mine:~ Lori, re. my daughter’s birthday (her daughter can’t make it)~ Dana, in response to my question about her new job~ Julie, can my kid cat-sit next week?How about your last three emails? Me?~ An ad from Amazon~ A response from my colleague about a marketing idea~ From the VBS director about praying for our kids this weekOne more? Facebook notifications:~ From FB: “People are looking at your Page! Write a post now!”~ Someone in my crochet group posted a new pattern~ I got a new Like on my last postWhat does every one of these distracting little bingshave in common?They’re not worth my kid dying over.My son is volunteering this summer at a parks and rec camp for handicapped kids and adults. I’m so proud of him I’m thinking of making him his own five-layer chocolate cake just because. Picking him up after his job has been tough, however, because I have to pick up his little sister at exactly the same time, fifteen minutes away. So he’s had to wait for me.Today, he’s decided to bike instead.And I’m terrified.Because I’ve seen how many people drive their cars while holding their cell phone screens next to the steering wheel. I’ve seen cars narrowly miss clobbering the vehicle next to them because their drivers were too busy dialing or scrolling or clicking to notice that they’d wandered into the wrong lane until the other driver honked in terror.I almost rear-ended somebody one time because I was three words away from finishing a text and I just. couldn’t. wait. (Thank you, anti-lock breaks.)It’s not worth it.It’s not worth it.It’s not worth it.Put the stupid phone away. Please don’t kill my kid because you can’t delay the gratification of knowing what someone said about your photo on Instagram until you arrive at your destination. That thin line of white paint on the pavement—the one that separates the car lane from the bike lane—won’t do a thing to keep my kid safe from you if you’re navigating your phone instead of your vehicle.I know how hard it is to ignore the alerts. But I’ve committed to never touching my phone when I’m driving, because I’ve told my kids that if I ever catch them touching their phones when they start driving I will take their licenses away and feed them to the paper shredder, and I will flay my progeny within an inch of their lives.Because it’s not just their lives they’d be jeopardizing.It’s the life of the toddler who pulled away from his mom and ran into the street.It’s the life of the pedestrian who played chicken with the WALK sign.It’s the life of the kid on his bike.I’ll bet if you checked your texts, emails, and notifications like I did, you discovered (like I did) that there’s nothing so time-critical it couldn’t have waited.If there is—maybe you’re the only doctor in the world who has the knowledge to save that patient and you have to do it right this moment—then pull over. Stop driving, and give that business your full attention.Otherwise, put the phone away while you’re operating a ton-plus slab of hurtling metal, against which a bike helmet is no match.Please don’t kill my kid.

No Little Prayer

I’m going through something right now. It involves someone that’s not me, so in the interest of that person’s privacy I won’t go into detail, but fear over this thing has been keeping me up at night, as well as jettisoning my appetite into a far corner of the space-time continuum. The good news is I’ve dropped five more of those baby pounds that I really can’t keep blaming on my now-teenagers.Recently, during another sleepless night, I called a friend in a different time zone and she prayed for me. After we hung up, I texted her to say thanks. I typed:I’m going to pray a little more before I try to go to bed.And because autocorrect has so many times bitten me on my bottom-parts, I went back to proof it before hitting Send. It read:I’m going to pray a lot more before I try to go bed.I didn’t want to give my friend any false impressions about my piety, or make her think I intended to stay up for hours after she just prayed for me to find enough peace to be able to sleep. So I put the cursor at the end of the word lot, backspaced, and retyped little.It autocorrected to lot.I tried again.It happened again.little à lotlittle à lotlittle à lotIt’s no exaggeration to tell you I tried six times or more to get that sentence to read little.But little would not stay little.I gave up and sent the text: I’m going to pray a lot more before I try to go to bed.Then I started a new text message, and typed:littleSpacebar. No change.Send. No change. Holy God. (And that’s no blasphemy.)This thing I’m dealing with, God seems to be saying, demands prayer. Not a little prayer, but a lot of prayer: a lot of prayer from me, and a lot of prayer from my prayer warriors. It’s going to take all the prayer I can get, from all the places I can get it.Because it feels like we’re standing against the whole savage world and the bloodthirsty legions of hell with this one.And we are.But God.But God said…But God remembered…But God intended…But God did…But God was…But God came…But God struck…But God charges…But God drags away the mighty by his power…But God will never…But God redeems…But God promised…But God knows…But God is…So there is no little prayer, because “the prayer of a righteous person has great power” (James 5:16) through the grace and sovereignty of the Almighty One.And this is no place for a little prayer.I am going to pray a lot more.I may have to walk through the valley of the shadow of death.But I will fear no evil.
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