A pair of Bushnell 7 X 15 X 35 binoculars hangs over a chair-back near our front window—the better to spy on the new neighbours. They don’t seem to mind the paparazzi, and appear oblivious to our inspection. (Then again, perhaps they’re watching us.)

 The robin parents hatched three chicks in the front-yard maple in late spring. The Preacher and I have never had such an intimate look at avian domesticity. Standing well back from the window, I peer in with fascination.

 Faultlessly loyal in his role as fly-in provider, papa robin coaxes his mate up to the edge of the nest so he can feed the triplets. Mama huddles there, supervising—seemingly glad for the break.

 For three’s a crowd, indeed.

 During my first pregnancy, our neighbour expected her second child. Her tummy grew unusually cumbersome. My last pregnancy, she vowed. Never again. But I’d like a big family, at least four, said her husband.

In colossal humour, both got their way. Fatima—two weeks overdue—gave birth to an unexpected set of triplets. She wore pyjamas for a solid year. When she took the babies for a walk in their triple stroller, she added a housecoat.

The robins’ nest, an almost weightless, neatly swirled circle of grasses, rests in a crotch of bark two limbs up, about ten feet off the ground. I worried plenty about it during the series of severe storms that recently battered our area. An umbrella of leaves doesn’t protect much.

During the worst, a gale that threatened human life, I grabbed the binoculars and sat down in front of the window to add a little watching to my worrying. There sat Mrs. Robin, unmoving, wings outstretched over her offspring. When the wind lifted the nest almost at a right angle to the tree, she clung tight. Drenched to her pinfeathers, her beak ran water-droplets like a leaky faucet.

Whenever the blow took an intake of breath before its next big gust, in darted the sodden male, bearing take-out. To my astonishment, he first fed his mate. She ate, then lifted herself off the nest just high enough for the chicks to thrust their gaping mouths out from under her wings.

That storm chased over a hundred people from their homes near here. Many houses sustained irreparable damage and have since been condemned. Yet my avian neighbours’ small circle of grasses remained intact—and so did the little family.

These are difficult times to keep a home together. Marriages have never before collapsed at the present rate. Battered by sundry storms, partners flee commitment, sacrificing future joy for present relief or passing pleasures. I grieve the brittle spirits, the inevitible from-bad-to-worse years, the wounds festering in childrens’ bewildered hearts.

Two weather-beaten people I love celebrated their fifty-eighth anniversary this month. They remind me of the robins. They held hard to Jesus, fought storms together, and survived formidable enemy attacks. They even survived raising me.

Lord, give us robin-spirits. Our neighbours are watching.

Bones have fascinated our son from his childhood. I remember the day that began.

At three, after a bad case of whooping cough, he needed weeks of physiotherapy in the hospital clinic. After one of his sessions, I stood discussing his progress with the therapist. Tired of our talk, Anthony hopped off the low table and disappeared around the corner.

Seconds later, he dashed back into the room. “Mommy, come here!” He tugged my hand and demanded I follow. We flew down the corridor and rounded the corner. He pulled me into a small dark room, weirdly lit by the light from the hall.

Pointing straight ahead, trembling a tad, he shouted. “WHAT IS IT?”

My eyes followed his finger and met the vacant gaze of a life-sized skeleton. Gulping, I explained what it was, and that nurses and doctors used it to teach people about our bodies.

Our boisterous son remained quiet all day. The next morning he doodled with his breakfast, then put his spoon down firmly and looked me in the eye. “Mommy, when I’m off my bones, where am I going to be, and where are my bones going to be?”    

Bones at breakfast. Every mother’s dream.

The “after death, what?” question slices through history. Every major religion includes an afterlife belief. Humans have a built-in sense that we are each part of something much bigger and longer than our few years on earth. We long not to end at our finish lines.

And indeed we don’t. Right over our cereal, I gave my child a crash course: Biblical Beliefs about Death 001.

“When people who love God and live for Jesus die, their spirits leave their bodies, honey. They don’t need their old bones anymore. Jesus said we’ll have new bodies in heaven.

He thought a moment. “But what happens to people who don’t love God?”

Cornflakes almost shot out my nose. I should have expected our intuitive child to point out the elephant in the room, the one many Christians ignore.

I can’t remember the exact words I used, but I told him what I learned as a child. That the Bible talks about hell, a lake of fire where Satan and his demons will get their due. And that though it makes God very sad, people who don’t love and obey him will end up there too—by their own choice.

Now that I’m older, I believe fewer things than I once did, but the more firmly I believe those few. And I still believe that God, in love, allows us to choose what happens after our earthly finish lines.

I recently attended a funeral for someone with a known passion for God and Biblical truth. The officiate talked all around the elephant in the room. I left there thinking we need a skeleton at every final service. And a tiny child, to ask in a voice clear and innocent: “When I’m off my bones, where am I going to be…?”

As our family drove home from Canada Day celebrations, the day rapidly changed moods. Since morning, we’d enjoyed sunshine at a heritage site about an hour southwest. Now, in stark contrast to the blue and gold, the afternoon sky became a collage of bizarre cloud formations. Some, blinding white and shaped like colossal cauliflowers, grew rapidly larger.

In the back seat and looking skyward, Benjamin Bean told cloud-stories. “That one’s a dragon, see? And there’s its baby. It looks HUNGRY!”

The sky lost its friendliness, blackening fast, until only a fist-sized clear spot remained. Then that disappeared too.

Rain comin’, we said, cruising through the city of Yorkton, our long-time home until we moved to a bedroom community a few miles north last year.

We’d been invited to a barbeque that evening. Guess the barbecue’s off, I thought. Noah came to mind too. With what would you have us build an ark, Lord? No gopher wood in this part of the prairie. And can we forget the pair of mosquitoes?

Moments after we arrived home, a storm of biblical proportions descended.  The rain started and the power quit. Thunder reverberated. Lightning zipped across the horizon.

Over the next several hours, over six inches of water fell on Yorkton and area—most of that in one twenty-minute period. According to those who know such things, that’s 894,321,540 gallons of water, spread over 6, 570 acres of city. It rushed off concrete and asphalt, found the lowest places, filled them up, and kept rising.

One person, standing in a basement apartment living room, noticed something strange on the wall. Sudden cracks appeared and raced floor-ward. A second later, the entire wall caved in, followed by another wall—rushing water. Swimming out was the only alternative. And waiting for rescue by canoe.

Up to seven feet of floodwater filled over half of Yorkton basements. It poured into hollows in the lowest parts of town. A sudden sea sprawled over farm-fields between our home and the city, necessitating livestock evacuation.

Thank God, no lives were lost—but multiple homes and businesses were destroyed. Local history books will mark Canada Day 2010.

Rain keeps coming, though the deluge has stopped. The sea has diminished—mostly. Felled trees have become firewood. Roofs sport colorful tarps. Basement windows wear boards. And waterlogged furniture and carpets hunker curbside, waiting for pickup.

But the storm continues in the lives of our neighbours. Faces remain wet with tears, electrified by shock. More than possessions were lost—lifestyles swept downstream. Speaking from experience, new normal takes years to find.

Many local initiatives have started to help the flood victims. The Preacher and I attended one less than a week after the flood—a hastily organized chili supper at the local Mennonite church. The chili, made by church members, was delicious. So were the buns—large, fluffy, and homemade.

I sampled, too, the best rhubarb dessert I’ve ever eaten, a square, topped with meringue.

Hope House, when we arrived, had two large rhubarb plants out back. We plowed one up last month. Now we have three. Always looking for new recipes, I inquired as to who had made that divine dessert.

One of the organizers told me its story. A community member had heard about the fundraiser and called to ask if she could bring something for dinner. She baked that dessert, and ALL the buns. No one seemed to know her name.

Here’s the best recipe I heard that night: When faced with need, take the thing you do best, the thing you enjoy doing most. Ask God to plug it in somewhere. Then start watching for open doors. Just as he did with the buns and the rhubarb, he’ll find a spot for every willing giver who wants to share his love with those in desperate need of hope.

And it really doesn’t matter if people ever know your name.

This morning, simply to celebrate the sun, I hung our wash outside to dry. Strung each piece against tree and sky. Threaded them like odd-shaped beads on a high wire.

Shirts and towels immediately began flirting with the breeze. Slacks and capris danced jigs in perfect time with the wind. And in clear view of the raspberry patch, the pretty things made indescribable moves.

When we bought our house, I didn’t pay much attention to the clothesline. But four-year-old Benjabean noticed its old rugged poles immediately. He saw the nearest first, silhouetted against the white and blue autumn sky. Then he noticed the second. It towers over the shady grove at the bottom of the yard. The secret place.

He stood. Thought a moment.

“Nana, you have two crosses in your backyard. Why?”

“They hold up the clothesline.”

“What’s a clothesline?”

That surprised me. I’m a first generation mostly-dryer-user, so the memory of the family laundry flapping in frequent coastal blows remains vivid. (As does the rush to haul it in before the typical washday rains.)

I’ll have to make sure to use the line when the grandbeans are around, I thought, as I clamped the wooden clothespins over the Preacher’s pyjamas. But suddenly I wondered something: was I doing right by my family textiles this sunny morning? Some say there’s a protocol for hanging clothes.

The people who live in Singapore’s high-rise apartments don’t seem to follow any protocol. In glorious freedom and unsorted array, their clean laundry sways high above the streets, dangling from poles telescoping straight out their windows.

I’ve seen that myself, and wondered how often Singaporeans lose laundry to the wind. What a shock it would be to find, while pedaling bike ten stories below, that the heavens have delivered a new shirt. Pasted it on as you rode.

Pinning our damp clothing to the line, I wondered about Western protocol. About whether I’d done it right, or if any lurking hanging-out-laundry-police could fine me for unlawful and disorderly handling of wet things. Later, I did a little research online. Sure enough, I’d broken almost every dearly held laundry law, except this one:

“Throughout the hanging of undergarments, it is best to check that degenerate neighbours are not feasting their eyes on the personals.”

Trees border our backyard. No neighbours, degenerate or otherwise, have feasting opportunity. Only a pair of agitated wrens observed me this morning. Their shrill buzzes warned me to steer clear of their house, hanging high on the east cross.

I’ve thought long about laundry today. About how beautiful clean is. How fragrant. About how much sweeter the world would be if everyone hung their wash out under sunny skies sometimes. And about how often in my heart I’ve stood in the shadow of another old rugged cross. Bowed low before Christ there.  And  humbled by forgiveness, felt my freshly washed soul flap about in delirious, glorious freedom.

No laws there either. No slaps on the wrist. Just grace. Just grace.

When did the lovely art of hospitality start to leave us? It dangles by a fraying thread, it seems. Even among Christ-followers, mandated to share both home and food, the hardened shears of too-much-business, and too-little-love have almost snipped it from among us.

The Preacher and I recently accepted an invitation to share a meal at the home of country friends. As our car charged like an eager steed over arrow-straight prairie roads, we became escapees to gentler times. Busy town life faded behind us like yesterday’s dreams.

In its place stood a wide, welcoming porch, and an apron-clad hostess beckoning, “Come in! Come in!” Inside, the air was redolent with fragrance. Cinnamon buns. Ham. And something else, discernible only with the spirit: the presence of Christ.

I’m positive he joined us as we sat around that table, beautifully decorated with smiling faces. I know he blessed us with his presence, influencing our thoughts and directing our conversation. I imagine his eyes gleamed. I imagine he listened to our chatter with interest. I imagine he chuckled.

It happened again a few evenings ago at our own home. Clouds hovered all day, threatening rain. But inside, as I prepared to open Hope House to others, God’s Son brushed my heart with joy.

The Preacher was away, so I’d invited five female friends. They flocked in, bearing dishes. We shared a salad supper, potluck style. We sat long. Talked much, laughed often. And sometime during the evening…perhaps when the youngest among us wandered over to our century-old piano, and teased a simple melody from its badly-tuned ivories…perhaps it was then, I sensed Christ enjoying the evening with us.

I have often, and gladly, shared time in restaurants with friends. But the convenience of not having to prepare both house and food comes at the expense of things precious: the joy of serving others, the intimacy of community life, and that sweet sense of sitting alongside a Divine, unseen guest.

When ordinary people share ordinary food and ordinary drink in an ordinary home, and when all that is mixed with love, something extra-ordinary happens. Something much sweeter than the triple-citrus cheesecake daughter Amanda supplied the other night.

Life, I think, doesn’t get much richer.

For decades, our family and friends sat around an antique nine-foot oak table. We’ve passed it on to our children now, but I cherish the memories made around its polished, time-and-child-worn finish.

We have a different table now; round and black, and already sticky with memories of precious guests who’ve shared it—family, friends, strangers. Gratitude overflows in me for each one.

Hospitality is always work. But when love propels it, it serves us in the end, refreshing drained and soured spirits, and dishing up memories that sustain soul-health for years.

I challenge you: open your door. Make it potluck, if you dare. But don’t forget to invite Christ. He is spirit sustenance itself: Bread of life, Oil of joy. Living water.

Invite someone home.

In our slice of the prairies, we`ve seen the sun so seldom this spring I’ve decided not to waste it. So I’m writing outside this sunny morning, perched on an old willow chair in my favourite part of our backyard.

Birdsong surrounds me, and the wind whispers through this grove of old maples. It toys with the rope swing, sways it east, then west, as though prompted so by an invisible child.

Until just a few days ago, the backyard of Hope House—like many others nearby—didn`t invite hopefulness.

“It`s the wettest year we’ve had in over a hundred years,” I`ve heard, from people who keep track of such things. People whose parents and grandparents likely did the same.

Basements that have never flooded before have decided to try it. Dark patches lay like shadows across the concrete in our own. Backyards feel like wet sponges, and dirt roads and lanes are a sea of mud.

Rain wouldn`t seem half so bad, if it didn`t need clouds to deliver it. Fretting about whether the deluge will hold off long enough to pot or plant, side, paint, or build would be much more fun if we could park our complaining selves in a willow chair in a sweet breeze, surrounded by brightness and birdsong.

But clouds and complaints keep company as surely as sunshine and bright thoughts.

Prairie people aren’t used to long strings of cloudy days. We share our misery like a bad cold. Even the optimistic find it difficult to rise above the clouds. After all, a silver lining requires at least a tiny beam of sun.

Reared on Canada’s wet Western edge, I grew up singing, “Rain, rain, go away, come again some other day. Rain, rain, go away, please let all the children play.” Nevertheless, if we wanted to enjoy the emerald coast, we had no choice but to make peace with the stuff that made it green. That meant slickers, rubbers, and umbrellas. From autumn to spring, we rarely left home without them.

Perhaps that’s our problem, we flatlanders. Most of us aren’t equipped for month-long rains.

But here I sit, surrounded by a green as lovely as any of my youth—because of the rain. The sun seems twice as bright as I remember it, and hope fills my heart for my sodden yard and the fields of our farmer friends.

The two-foot, three-striped black garter snake that almost slithered over my foot a moment ago seems happy too. His narrow pink tongue tasted my welcome, and seemed to find it to his liking. He circled me, returning for more. Snakes don’t hear kind words often, I suspect.

God, who does everything well, and who whispers beauty through every weather—thank you for this reprieve of sunshine. Forgive our complaints, and remind us that you’ve given us the ability to choose which side of the clouds to live on.

But help me find a pair of rubber boots, please. It’s clouding over again.

Before he left home, our son Anthony spent a peck of time at the home of one of his friends. I didn’t know that friend’s family, and I wondered when a bill for his room and board would arrive.

A decade later, I’ve finally met that mother. By a happy lack of planning, she sat beside me in church one day.

She surprised me by asking how Anthony was, and explained how she knew him. We chatted about those days, and she told me this:

When Anthony decided to sell his car, she bought it. She paid a hundred dollars for the old Honda Civic, and both her sons drove it for years. “It was a really good little car,” she said. “I never had to do anything with it.”

But one day her youngest son returned home with news. The Honda had broken down beside the highway. He’d left it there, and hitched a ride home. “We should send out a tow truck,” said his mother.

“It’ll be fine,” he told her. “I’ll go back and get it tomorrow.”

But next morning the RCMP called. They’d traced her through the car’s licence plate, they explained. During the night thugs had vandalized the forsaken vehicle, then set it ablaze. Anthony’s old Civic had rolled its last mile.

The insurance company wrote the car off. “We can’t give you more than $500 for it,” the agent apologized.

She grinned, telling me. “That little car was good while I had it, but it was worth even more ruined!”

I laughed along with her—and laughed even harder when she told me about the day she’d bought the aging hatchback. “It was covered in stickers,” she said. I remembered those. The car’s steel blue body barely showed through. Skulls and crossbones, rock band logos, and bumper stickers—our darlin’ boy had decorated his chariot well. Whenever I protested, a new sticker appeared. I learned to bite my tongue.

My companion said she wasn’t stuck on the stickers either. When Anthony delivered the car, she’d looked it over. “Well,” she’d said, “I guess I could take the stickers off.”

“Oh, don’t do that, Mrs. M.” he’d shot back, alarmed. “I think they’re sort of holding the car together!”

She left them on.

We shared a moment of laughter. Of wondrous gratitude that we’d all survived those raisin’ years. But when I thanked her for the free board and room, she tossed it off. “I always loved it when my boys had their friends over. At least I knew where they were.”

I’d love to report that I was that charitable in those days. Instead, I spent less time trying to know my son’s friends than I did fomenting  about their—and his—choices of clothes, music, and activities.

Stickers all. Everyone uses them, and often we’re positive they hold us together. But unlike me, our Heavenly Father looks past those, to the truly important stuff, and invites us home.

Father, make me more like you.

My dearest book, my favourite gift from my sister Beverly, is bedraggled and weary. God’s lively Word, encased in tattered cardboard, is coming unhinged.  Like me, some days.

In case you’ve ever wondered, the Bible is the backbone behind these weekly columns. God uses it to help keep my Sunny Side Up and retrieve it when I’m hard and stepped on. (The Preacher would like you to know how very often that happens.)

I don’t worship the Bible—but I believe it. God speaks life through it, when we listen. And though my copy is old and tired, the words inside remain vibrant, alive, and powerful.

Among other things, it’s the Bible God uses to teach me when I’m ignorant (regularly), caution me when I’m aiming at danger, comfort me when I’m facing loss, restore my creativity when life sucks it away, and bring hope when I’m feeling hopeless.

But my particular volume of onion-skin pages is almost done in. The ends of the bright ribbons that mark my reading places have mostly frayed to fluff. The protective coating on the hard cover has nearly all peeled off.  I’ve scribbled so many notes in the margins of my favourite passages that I can barely read the text. I’ve underlined some verses so often that I’ve almost worn clear through a few of the pages.

Oh, and the spine is missing. Entirely.

Over the last three years, in the upheaval of suddenly changed family circumstances, that pink copy of the Bible has been my lifebuoy. In the worst of times, and often in the best, it’s the book I reach for first thing in the morning, last thing at night, and sometimes in between.

I’ve mentioned here before, the day I noticed my tiny grandaughter flipping through it reverently as it lay on the coffee table. When she noticed me watching, her beautiful face illuminated with joy, “Nana,” she said, “I WUV your Bible!”

Me too, Butterfly Bean. Me too.

But likely not as much as Natan (Anatoli) Shcharansky loved his portion of God’s Word. Imprisoned in the Soviet Gulag for over a decade—for trying to escape to Israel—Russian authorities stripped the dissident Jew of every possession except his miniature collection of the Psalms. His jailers tried often to get that too, but Shcharansky refused to hand it over. That gained him a penalty of 130 days in brutal solitary confinement.

The Psalms kept him alive, he said later. In his autobiography, Fear No Evil, Shcharansky comments, “I took my Psalm Book, and for days on end… recited all one hundred and fifty of King David’s Psalms, syllable by syllable.”

Thanks to his family’s tireless efforts, Scharansky gained his freedom in 1986. At his release, the guards tried again to take away his book of Psalms. He flung himself face down in the snow and refused to walk to freedom without it. The guards capitulated.

I understand Scharansky. Some things in life are more important than freedom.

We took to the water recently, the Preacher and I. Bodies filled the indoor pool, sporting a colorful array of swimsuits, in varying coverages. We wore boring, conservative styles, befitting our weathered frames.

A few decades ago, we looked different.

I shrieked the first time I saw the Preacher in a bathing suit—a roaring-twenties-style, one piece, purple full-body costume. He bought it himself, “because no one else had one.” Sleeveless, it flowed almost to his knees and floated clear up to his collar bones. It had narrow green and white horizontal stripes, and buttons down the front.

Even in the seventies, that swimsuit was an anomaly.

The Preacher’s physique has changed since then. He once had the profile of a pencil (with long wavy hair), weighed a mere hundred and sixty-five pounds, and enjoyed the reputation around campus as an academic and sports heavyweight.

Wearing that suit made him dangerous. His well-aimed teardrop dives erupted in volleys of splashes that sent clusters of co-ed girls, myself among them, squealing in protest to the pool’s edges.

My own most memorable bathing suit was only that for me: a rather conservative black bikini with tiny bright flowers.

I’d purchased it in spite of my raising, one that installed in me a deep-seated certainty that only the female lower legs, arms, neck, and facial skin could tolerate direct air. I’d never owned a two-piece, let alone a bikini, and I wore it only once, on a swim date with the Preacher. (At least one of us was properly clothed.)

On another visit to the local pool with my grandchildren, a lovely lady wearing a truly teeny, weeny, eensy bikini entered the pool area. Benjamin’s already large eyes widened even more. “Nana,” he exclaimed, in loud amazement. “That lady is wearing her undies!”

I chuckled. “It sure does look that way, doesn’t it?”

He watched her slip into the water, then turned to me, “Nana,” he said again. This time his voice softened into full-blown compassionate wonder. “Did she FORGET to put on her bathing suit?

Does she HAVE a bathing suit? ”

“Do you think she needs one?”

He nodded slowly. “Yaw. She should get one. Mama should give her one, I think.”

Right there, I felt a pang of sadness. Our sexually charged culture will assault that beautiful innocence. Attempt to batter it on the craggy cliffs of peer pressure. The devil will help.

My grandson looked at a beautiful body, and saw need—hers. Many others would have seen need too—their own.

Pornography, flourishing through easy internet access, has become a terminal cancer among us. The Preacher and I have watched it kill marriages and rot friends and colleagues from the inside out.

Christ grieves those tragedies—many involve his own children.

Nevertheless, like the Preacher’s well-aimed teardrop dives, websites like www.pureintimacy.org , www.covenanteyes.com , and www.x3pure.com, splash a volley of refreshing hope in the midst of the maelstrom.

If pornography has seared you, remember: God is far bigger.