Benjamin Bean attended a funeral with me a few weeks ago. During the eulogy and reflective readings he remained stone still, tucked into my side.

“Nana,” he whispered, suddenly, softly. Turning to me. “I’ll be sad at your funeral.”

The direction of his thoughts startles me often. “That’s okay,” I whispered back. “But you can be a little bit happy then too, because, remember, I’ll be living with Jesus in Heaven, more alive than ever. And when you get there too, we’ll be together again.”

“Nana. I know,” he said, all glum-like.

I gave him a squeeze. “Anyway, honey, you don’t have to worry about that for awhile. I still have a lot of living left to do.”

His stillness told me his thread of somber thought hadn’t yet spun out. I waited. Finally, out came this: “You’re right, Nana. But I have more living left to do than you.”

I had no more words. Because if things go as they ought, my grandbean is right, and we both know it. My dot on the timeline of this part of my life is far to the right of center. Two decades left, perhaps three?

I try to imagine the chances-are changes ahead, clear-eyed: I will grieve loved ones. My grandbeans will grow up and away and forget me. My body won’t do what I tell it to. I’ll need to downsize and move. My public words will stop, and my private ones may fail. My activities will slow and so will my brain. My circle of friends will diminish. I’ll have to obey my children. I’ll end up wearing diapers.

Put that way, old age appears grim. But another perspective lessens my apprehension. It comes not only from my certainty that God will accompany me to the final dot on my earthly timeline, but from the clear example of others in times past and present. People like our friend Anna Ingham, renowned educator and developer of the Blended Sight and Sound Method of Learning.

The Preacher and I attended Anna’s 100^th birthday tea recently. We arrived too late to see her jig to “Robin in the Rain,” the song she taught children for the better part of her marathon almost eight-decade career. But we arrived in time to hear and see tributes to a striking legacy of faith and life.

As it has for the rest of our elderly friends, the aging process has dealt Anna numerous challenges. She meets those with the same “Let’s make a game of it!” attitude that has endeared her to generations of students. She chooses to focus on the glad over the sad. To grab God’s hand instead of a fistful of complaints. And at her party, though she could barely see, she beamed.

You and I may indeed have fewer years of living ahead than behind. With God’s help, let’s choose to fill them with faith, hope, love and purpose.

But fellow Christ-followers, never forget: The best is yet to be.

Anna Gertrude Ingham, originator of the Blended Sound-Sight method of learning, was invested as a member in the Order of Canada in 1994, is a recipient of the 2005 Saskatchewan Centennial Medal, the Queen’s Golden Jubilee Medal in 2002 and the Canada 125 Medal in 1992.

On a recent trip to Ottawa, I wandered over to the Canadian National War Memorial on Parliament Hill. The monument was surrounded by flocks of curious onlookers standing eight or nine deep behind a blockade.

A member of Hill security stood on the adjacent road, arms folded, inspecting us. “Move, buddy,” someone complained, not quite loud enough for him to hear. “We can’t see.”

Suddenly a long red tide of uniformed guards swept past, so close I could have touched their tall black hats. They flowed as one across the road to the square in front of the tomb.

“What’s happening?”someone asked.

“The PM of Britain’s in town,” I heard, to my left. “He’s gonna lay a weath on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.” He said it nonchalantly, the way a farm kid would talk about a roosting hen.

A cavalcade of black cars beetled its way down from Parliament Hill, crossed Wellington and proceeded to the tomb of the young soldier whose name only God knows. Craning my neck around our vigilant guard, I could barely make out Prime Ministers Harper and Cameron as they stepped from their cars onto the pavement.

The dignitaries did a leisurely walk-past of the phalanx of troops. While a bugler played the Last Post, they stood shoulder to shoulder, heads bowed. Honouring the young man and those he represented who’d given their lives for the likes of us.

Only after the final note died, did Mr. Cameron walk forward to lay his wreath. The Parliament Hill cannon thundered and smoked twenty-one times. Cameras clicked, and then it was over.  

When the Prime Ministers made their way back to their cars (the press in hot pursuit), the red tide flowed out, the black crawled back up the Hill, and we ordinary citizens scuttled away like so many crabs. Back to normal. For some, back to forgetting.

Back home a few weeks later, I attended a concert by Canadian tenor John McDermott. The beloved “singist” (as he jokingly refers to himself) is renowned not only for his voice, but for his powerful advocacy of veterans across North America. He talked a bit about remembering; sang about it too. Moved many—myself included—to tears.

But it was his remembrance of another death that stirred me most. Lifting his now white head, he sang with deep sincerity these words by Stuart Townend:

I will not boast in anything
No gifts, no power, no wisdom
But I will boast in Jesus Christ
His death and resurrection.

Why should I gain from His reward?
I cannot give an answer
But this I know with all my heart
His wounds have paid my ransom.

Remembrance Day is past. For most of the crowds that gathered at tombs and cenotaphs, forgetting days are here again. But if there’s one tomb we should not walk away from, forgetting, it’s the empty one that once held heaven’s soldier, who gave his life for the likes of us.

***

You can hear John McDermott’s sing “How Deep the Father’s Love for Us”  on his album ‘Great is Thy Faithfulness’ available for purchase at his website:  http://johnmcdermott.com/?m=2  

Hear Stuart Townend talk about the process of writing ”How Deep…” at

( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BdVQNyQmdM4&feature=related)

“Nana, am I five now?” my third grandbean, aged a mighty three, asked the other day. “Cuz when I get to five, I can SPEED!”

 Slow down, child. Just a minute ago, a half-century ago, I was five too.

 In 1961 the average hourly wage was $1.15. The average annual full-time salary, about six and a half thousand dollars. But $18,800 would buy a new house, and $2,275 a brand new car. Gas cost 31 cents a gallon, and you could mail a local first class letter for 4 cents.

 In 1961, the world contained just 4 billion people. Canada’s population sat at 18,238,247.  In the U.S., John F. Kennedy was inaugurated as President, and the same year marked the birth of future president Barak Obama—just in time to have his bottom pampered by the first disposable diapers in the world.

 To the south, President Fidel Castro declared Cuba a Communist State. In Germany, Berlin constructed a wall.

 But in 1961, entire Western families still sat together on tweed couches, watching Billy Graham’s Hour of Decision (or Dick Van Dyke) on 12” black and white televisions (perhaps munching toast that came from a 21 cent loaf, drinking milk poured from a $1.05 gallon jug.)

 Those same families likely shared a church pew on Sundays, and bowed their heads to pray before they ate.

 Times have changed some. Do I want my grandbean to speed, to five or fifty-five? On the contrary. I shudder to think what the next half-century holds for the simple faith already growing inside her.

 Here’s why: A great and spreading ache has overtaken us. The Biblical message that God loves the world, and sent his Son as the answer for our deepest needs is under attack as never before.

 In many countries worldwide, determined efforts to undermine the Christian faith—even eliminate it—have escalated. Inside many Western Christian churches, doctrine is dancing to the piper of social acceptability.

 In other parts of the world, speaking up for those things that are trademark to Christianity: respect for life, right living, love for one’s neighbour, kindness to the weakest members of society, forgiveness of one’s enemies, intolerance for injustice and inequality, and defence of the Word of God, is tantamount to a death sentence.

 There’s more: according to the organization, Voice of the Martyrs*, in the countries of North Korea, Burma, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and over sixty other countries, one Christian is martyred every five minutes. It is routine in those countries for Christians to suffer torture, harassment, rape, imprisonment, slavery, kidnapping and death.

 That organization has designated this Sunday, November 13, as this year’s International Day of Prayer for the Persecuted Church. They would like to remind Christians in the West to pray. If one suffers, we all suffer, they say.

Pray this Sunday, for Christ’s Body West and Christ’s Body East. And for the sake of my grandbeans, and yours, and all the children of God–don’t stop.

 Find out more at http://www.dayofprayer.org/  and http://www.persecution.net/

In the flurry of my newly-four-year-old grandbean’s birthday party, while I washed Romaine lettuce under the tap–preparing a salad to accompany my daughter’s lasagna–the child came to me. Grabbed my hand and said, fiercely intent, “Nana, tell me the story of Jonah.”

“Later, love. I’m helping Mama make a salad. I’ll tell it to you later, okay?”

But there was no time for stories during the party. The next day my phone rang. When I picked it up, a little voice, without so much as a “Hello,” whispered, “Nana, would you read me a Bible story, please?”

All my grandbeans have the memories of elephants. A few decades past their ages, I do not. I’d already forgotten the request from the day before.

“Which one, would you like?” I asked, knowing the answer before it came—the one our night-time Bible storybook opens to automatically. 

“Jonah. You said you’d read it to me yesterday.” Well. Okay then. From memory, I dove into the requested Bible story, the one about a reluctant prophet named Jonah. God sent him with a message for the people of the city of Ninevah: back off sinning, or burn up sinning. Jonah, who didn’t much like the Ninevahites, and would have just as soon seen them burn, boarded a boat going in the opposite direction.

(I love the way the Bible so honestly records the flaws of those to whom he gives big jobs. Since I’ve done a bit of fleeing from God’s pointing finger, myself, it makes me feel less lonely.)

Things got worse rapidly. When a violent storm threatened to capsize the boat, the Bible says, Jonah recognized it as God’s discipline for his disobedience. When he instructed his shipmates to throw him overboard they obliged.

In the water, a greeting committee waited—one very large fish. Jonah found lodging in its belly for three days before the creature headed for shore and heaved him up on the beach. (Just thinking of the stench makes me want to heave too.)

At the other end of the phone, my grandchild stayed quiet until the fish appeared. Then a blurt exploded in my ear, a breathless run-on question. “The big whale came to save Jonah, DIDN’T HE, NANA? To save Jonah from drowning!”

 I stopped, startled, remembering my own thoughts as a child hearing the same story. To me the big fish represented God’s discipline on a prophet who headed west when God told him to go east. It took me decades to comprehend the picture of God my grandbean had caught in four short years; to understand that sometimes the things we fear will devour  us are actually sent by God to protect us from a far greater destruction.

 Got a whale heading your way? Remember this: God is good. God is merciful. And God is the God of second chances.

***

The story of Jonah has never been told the way the amazing little Bible storyteller named Mary Margaret tells it.

Since creation, two corresponding questions have risen, set, and risen again. Like the sun and moon, they loom large on the horizon of human thought. “Who is God?” and “Who am I?”

The Bible records that God created man(kind) in his own image. History shows that man immediately began creating God in his, and that along the way, he killed the God-man, Jesus Christ.

  After peering at the God of the Bible through his academic telescope, author Richard Dawkins answers the first question this way: God is a work of fiction.

“The God of the Old Testament,” he says, “is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction; jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.”

   Well, isn’t that a lovely bunch of coconuts? Dawkins, whom the media sometimes refers to as the “world’s most influential atheist,” authored the recent book “The God Delusion,” from which that quote is taken.

   Mr. Dawkins, it seems to me, has his telescope upside down. “The Heavens are telling the glory of God,” I read this morning in Psalm 18 (an Old Testament reference, by the way). Those words confirmed what I saw in the crimson sunset last evening.

 But here’s more, also gleaned from the Old Testament, in Isaiah, chapters 25 and 26: God is: “zealous for his people, the doer of marvelous things, perfect faithfulness, a refuge for the poor and needy, a shelter from the storm, a shade from the heat, the perfect peace-giver, maker of salvation, the Rock eternal, the way-smoother, the establisher of peace, the nation enlarger, the glory-gainer, border extender, the preparer of delicious food.”

   God doesn’t need the likes of me to defend him, and he’s likely laughing at Mr. Dawkins’ list. According to the Old Testament, his justice also brings down pride and cleverness. He has power to discipline nations and peoples; to remove the disgrace of those he loves, to swallow up death forever, and to wipe away all tears. 

   A high percentage of Westerners declare a belief in God, but given that the litmus test of any belief lies in a willingness to act on it, I suspect the true delusion regarding God lies in another area—atheism by default.*

   Like Dawkin’s outspoken atheism, default atheism has affected our world a long time. 20^th century author Russian Fedor Dostoevsky once made a sober observation about the West. He believed we were in trouble—not because of the God we worship, but because of the God we ignore.

“The West has lost Christ and that is why it is dying; that is the only reason.” Dostoevsky, and many other genuine followers of God before and since, knew the truth: If you wish to kill God—you will also kill mankind. Because without God, there is no life, and no freedom. 

   Whichever position you take—consider it carefully.  

*By the term “default atheism” some atheists mean that people are born without belief and that a belief in God is a mere result of societal indoctrination. That’s not what I’m referring to here. But I am (perhaps over)stating the fact that making it a practice to ignore God and his requirements for living (regardless of lip-service) is the equivalent (and as eternally soul-destructive) to declaring he doesn’t exist.

Gourmet food. French-accented waiters. Alabaster columns, domed ceilings, and ghosts of nobility and dignitaries. But when I’ve forgotten much else about that elegant business dinner, I’ll remember the man sitting to my right.

“What are you having?” he asked, studying his menu. The buffet,” I said. (It seemed a safer bet than the culinary jargon between the leather covers.)

“Good choice.”

I learned things about my table-mate as the meal progressed. Owner—for over three decades—of a beloved shore-line restaurant. Chairman of this and president of that. CEO of a vital national organization. That he doesn’t do desserts or vegetables, and that on his phone he had a photo of himself shaking hands with President Obama.

He only told me all that because I poked. Mostly, we discussed simpler things. Family and marriage (a half-century for his own, thirty-five for mine). Pets (his three-pound Yorkie, my three-ounce parrot). The precariousness of life and his goal of packing each day full of worthwhile moments. The importance of serving others (as he dished his tomatoes my way) and the joy of fishing. The latter two, I’ve learned, have earned him a broad reputation.

Our hotels both lay within walking distance. After dinner we left the restaurant together. “It’s raining,” he said of the mist outside. “Perhaps we should catch a cab.” But a bus came by just then. We hopped on. He noticed I was laughing. Asked why.

“I find it funny,” I said, “that a man who just finished showing me photos of himself holding a small crocodile, snagged by his own barb, fears a few raindrops.”

“It’s my suit,” he confessed. “I didn’t bring another one for tomorrow.”

“Just hang it up in your closet when you get back to your room,” I said. “It’ll be fine.”

“Yes, Mother,” he said.

At my hotel, my companion bid me a cheerful good-night and carried on. But here’s what I’ll remember most about him: Over dinner, he handed me his business card. “If I can ever help you in any way,” he said. “Feel free to call.” Amazingly, I believe he meant it—and that his determination to serve others is one secret to his highly productive life.

One day I’ll sit down to another banquet, and in an atmosphere far more rarefied, I’ll meet more unforgettable people. We’ll all be there for the same reason I attended that business dinner: by the good graces of our Host alone. We’ll share Heaven’s table not because of who we are or what we’ve done for him, but simply because of what he’s done for us. Not only did he live to serve—he died to save.

His invitation, extended with open arms at Calvary’s cross, reads something like this: Come hungry. Come dirty and thirsty. Come undeserving. But come through me. I am the Way. And call anytime. Signed: Jesus Christ.

Hope to meet you there.

It’s Thanksgiving day as I write this. The dining table extends clear into the living room. We’ll gather round it in a few hours, a collection of family and friends. They’ll arrive any minute, expecting laughter, food and fellowship. We’ll have that—and pumpkin too.

Most of our family likes pumpkins—the Preacher is the only holdout, as usual. Today pumpkins decorate the tablecloth, and in the hall a wooden scarecrow holds one close to his heart. My recipe cupboard holds a homemade community-contributed pumpkin cookbook, and once upon a time, I even made pumpkin pickles. We won’t have those this year, but at least one pumpkin will join us for lunch. Our daughter has promised to contribute one of her famous cheesecakes—pumpkin this time.

In the gardens nearby, frost decorates the pumpkins that have escaped Thanksgiving tables, those waiting for Halloween. And there’s a green one sitting on my back steps, waiting to ripen. When it does, I’ll call the grandbeans over. We’ll carve it into something cheeky, then eat the cut-out bits, cooked with brown sugar, butter, and cinnamon.

My neighbour is ahead of me—a congregation of pumpkins sits on her front steps. Their cheerful faces grin at the Preacher and I as we pass on our evening walk. I smile every time—it’s impossible not to. They remind me of something I saw a few weeks ago at a city Farmer’s Market: row upon row of flaming orange miniature pumpkins, each one a different painted face. They stopped my rush, and made me laugh.

I didn’t laugh, though, at the news article I read the other day. In a grocery store in Alymer, Quebec, a 57 year old man and his wife noticed a theft in process—two young men attempting to steal a pumpkin. When the man told them to put it back, they put up a fight instead. In the melee the pumpkin-rescuer died, and the 19-year old is in custody. Two lives, one gone, one forever changed.

And all for the sake of a pumpkin.

As a rookie clergy couple, the Preacher and I attended our first conference for pastors. The speaker was Dr. Charles Strickland; a sage, humourous, and well-seasoned ministry leader. Still recovering from a heart attack he spoke with poignant earnestness about the importance of making wise decisions in life and ministry. And he cautioned us never to toss aside the eternal best for the sake of the temporary good.

Throughout the three decades since, whenever I’ve been tempted to risk something precious for a temporary passion, no matter how sweet, I’ve thought of his advice. I repeat it to myself, and as I do, I can almost hear my priorities clicking into place. Maybe it will assist you, too:

 “Never jump off a bridge to rescue a hat.” Or a pumpkin, I say.

The world’s a bleeding mess, God. It’s time to raise praise anyway. For faith, family and friends, always at the top of my list. But for other things too.

In these days of tremendous trouble everywhere, thank you for good and bad news. One reminds me to pray, the other to praise: Thank you for the abducted child returned, the downgraded storm, the building that stood, the just sentence, the inspiration of a great life well lived..

Thank you that Dad and I got to share birthdays last week. Fifty-five alive, and eighty-eight at the gate—how neat is that? Thank you for his embrace, and my heritage of grace.

For tomorrow’s hope, and today’s strength, thank you, Lord. For my body; for legs that can still walk a mile, hands and mind to do good work, and arms to embrace my best loves. (And thanks for keeping your angels on duty when one of those faced danger on the highway last week.)

Thank you for your Word; for those who live it well and those who speak it true. For Jesus who walks beside, and for strong gusts of Spirit-wind that blow me right.

Thank you for my trials: they are the means through which you pour on layers of grace. For each day’s little victories, and the hard stuff that make them possible, I praise you too.

Thanks for the people who make me feel small—and for putting those verses in the Bible that say you see and care for the little and the least.

Thank you, too, for the gift of being needed, called on, consulted, demanded of and expected of. Remind me often, Lord, that you put me here to be used; that an obligation-free life is generally a useless life. Remind me also when it’s time to say no.

Thank you for open door, and for Divine inspiration to sprinkle a few good words in the lives of so many good people.

At the fringe of fall, I thank you for nature’s nearby beauty. For the last vase of summer (pink daisies in the old stump garden, an ambitious sunflower poking its head over the edge of the roof, white petunias that have avoided the early killing frosts) and the seed packet of spring: zinnia, hollyhock, sunflower, and Jacob’s ladder.

Thank you that from our own soil and your gracious hand, we now have raspberries in the freezer, potatoes the Preacher grew, and tomatoes without blight. From others’ dirt, we have so much more. Thank you that there’s always enough to share, and thank you for doing that first.

For these and a thousand other blessings, I praise God from whom all blessings flow.

At 9:14 a.m., one blizzardly weekend last spring, I picked up my home office telephone and dialed long-distance. Someone picked up. “You’re on, Kathleen.”

“Good morning, fellow scribes! I never thought we’d be meeting like this!” For the next forty-five minutes, I delivered the most awkward keynote address I’ve ever given. Those at the other end—watching a telephone talk into a mic—likely felt the same.

I’d been booked for months to speak and present a workshop at that writer’s conference, four hours from home.

Hoping for good travelling weather the Preacher and I had set out in plenty of time to make my first session. But an hour into our trip, we met a colossal snowstorm, so bad even semis had pulled over.

The evening before, the event’s co-ordinators and I had discussed a contingency plan—just in case. “Hon,” I said now, “turn around.” For once, he didn’t argue.

We beat the storm home, despite a long detour around a washed out road. CAUTION, read a small diamond-shaped sign perched a few feet before the raging creek.

Back home, I called Saskatoon. “You know that plan…?”

That’s why I spoke at that conference while sitting in my own office, while watching the blizzard and a shocked flock of purple finches. No doubt expecting spring, they’d just arrived, and seemed grateful for the feeder on our deck.

My workshop went only marginally better—thanks to Skype, a computer program which allows two parties to see and hear each other—sort of. My workshop attendants appeared as indecipherable blobs on chairs, stuttering words I couldn’t properly hear, answering questions I couldn’t properly ask. But we were all very gracious.

I attended the rest of the conference by Skype too; a silent, smiling, blurry face on a computer in the corner, watching the passing scenery: mostly people’s middle thirds, and a few bobbing purses.

Twice, the room housed other workshops. Because the computer that contained me was facing the room, and not the platform, I couldn’t see the speakers. Finally, “Please turn me!” I scrawled on a sheet of paper, holding it in front of my computer’s camera. I heard laughter, then a body got up and walked toward me. When all I could see was a stomach, the room revolved, and the platform appeared.

During a coffee break, a woman walked over, sat down, and looked directly into the camera at her end. For the first time all day, I looked someone in the eye.

“I was at a workshop you spoke at in Calgary about ten years ago,” she said. “Just thought I’d come over and thank you. You’re the reason I’m writing today.”

God gives us all gifts to share. Some days we do that better than others. But every opportunity to do so—even awkwardly—is also a gift. And sometimes an even greater gift returns.

What are you sharing?

God never says “No,” except for one reason—to provide a better, “Yes.” Let me explain.

I stopped at an old neighbour’s place the other day to keep a promise too long past. A few years ago, he and his wife had joined the Preacher and me and two other friends in our dining room. We ate ice cream cake. Sang “Happy Birthday.” Laughed. At some point, smiles on all our faces, I picked up my camera and snapped.

It would be the last photo ever taken of one of us. It was that photo I’d come to deliver. When I set it on the table, our friend stared a long time. “That’s the best picture I have of her,” he sobbed. Then, “Will you sit down a bit? Do you have time?”

I made time, and learned more about the woman I knew only as a lovely, jolly woman who loved Jesus and served others with joy.

“Before we got married, she had a good job in Winnipeg,” her husband told me, that afternoon. “I had an old Fordson tractor, a rented farm, an old Essex car, and one cow. She left her job for a hard life with me. I don’t know why she did that. I had nothing to offer her.”

“Not true,” I said. “You had what she wanted most. You.”

He kept talking. “When they told her she had cancer, she declined treatment. The doctor said she was one of only three people he’d treated in the last several years, who didn’t ask, “isn’t there anything you can do?”

She used a wheelchair for the last few years of her life. “She had so much pain.” He shook his head. “I got mad at God. He promised us we could move mountains. That if we ask ANYTHING in his name, he would do it. But he never took away her pain.”

Life got very dark for our friend. He’d lost his smiling wife, and he started to question God. One day, he flung himself onto his knees beside his couch. “God,” he prayed, “just give me one reason why you didn’t take the pain away. Just one. I’ll live with that.”

“Suddenly,” he said, his eyes faroff. “I saw a lawn, sort of. A grassy area, but most of the grass was worn off. I thought it was maybe a schoolyard or something. Then I realized it was heaven.”

Then, “just as clear as I’m seeing you, I saw her. Running around. Joyful. Jumping up and down.” She’d even come closer to speak to him. To make sure he knew.

He told me he sensed that was God’s answer. “I let her have so much pain, so she could enjoy heaven more.”

“OK, I can live with that,” he told God, and he told me they’re on speaking terms again.

I thought it may encourage someone to hear one man’s story.

There’s always a greater “Yes.” Believe it.

I’m praying for you.