I read a media list of 25 Influential Atheists recently. They were all well-educated, and, in some circles, highly respected.

The list inspired a search for a similar list of 25 Influential Christians.

Nothing. 25 Prominent Thinking Christians? Zip. 25 Christians? Nada.  (Kidding.)

I did find an early 2000’s TIMES photo essay depicting 25 of America’s Top Evangelicals. A fairly impressive list, but it contained few scholars. And shortly after, one of those people, the president of the largest association for Evangelicals in the US had a rather public failure that likely knocked him off any such list for the near future.

Last century, I graduated from a Christian Liberal Arts college and earned a (da, da, da, dum!) Bachelor’s degree in Sacred Literature. Truthfully, in those heady years of youthful independence, far from home, I studied mainly other things.

In no particular order: Psychology,  a boyfriend, Sociology, another boyfriend, English, a problem with the boyfriend, Western Civilization, a resolve of problem with the boyfriend, Music History, my sparkling engagement ring, and finally—and during Philosophy classes, a few Bridal catalogues. (Yes, the Preacher—who managed to get a theology degree.)

I did take a broadly sweeping course called Old Testament Survey, and—if I recall correctly, a corresponding one for the New Testament. I’d have to study my transcript, but I suspect that’s all.

What I have learned about the Bible I have learned since—in other courses of study, in other places, in a more dedicated frame of mind.

I’m not mocking my alma mater; simply my naive assumptions that such a degree would make me a “thinking Christian.”

Some days, depending on my state of gray matter, I imagine I can think. I do it well in spurts, like a whale spouts. But I often wonder if can I do it well enough, and convey those thoughts convincingly enough to result in anything that would nudge anyone toward Christian faith?

Now that I’m a grandmother to four small and dear grandbeans, I struggle to keep a modicum of reasonably adult intelligence in my faith columns and broadcasts, and any other articles I write—for any readers who have kept patience with me thus long. But I’d certainly never be on a list like that.

If nothing else my book covers would exclude me. My last book, Practice by Practice, has a teacup on the cover. Some people love that cover, they tell me, and what’s inside the book. But nevertheless, there’s a teacup on the cover. And cookies. Lilacs, too, and chubby bare feet.

Echoing in my ears is this quote from Elizabeth Elliott: “If you make people think they’re thinking, they’ll love you. But if you actually make them think, they’ll hate you.”

Nevertheless, surely there are, somewhere out there, alive, 25 Thinking Christians, who are equally respected and known OUTSIDE the stained-glass windows of our churches—because that’s where a Christ-like mind shines brightest.

And if not, oh, Lord, the atheists are winning hands down in the public arena.

***

Since writing the above, I’ve found a listing of 10 Most Influential Leaders of 2010. 

God has gifted us all with seven days per week. Like beads, he strings them together with a sturdy thread of words—read, spoken, even written.

The pattern of my beads is simple: I spend three days a week in a small house, in a small town, doing ordinary, necessary things; having ordinary and necessary conversations.  On those days, my commute to my office is brief; down a short hall (hung with two bold paintings by an old friend, and two old windows with peeling white paint) and around the corner to a small office with a big window and a tiny desk.

I love those days, strung as they are with exquisitely common words.

Four days a week, I have a longer commute, through an ever-shifting kaleidoscope of sky and prairie. Sometimes I stop to snap a photo, or watch the harvest, or marvel at a hovering flock of migratory birds, practicing for their long flight to southern summer. In winter I stop simply to catch breath stolen by hoar frost, glittering under pale winter sun like a mosaic of shattered mirrors.

In a large town, I sit behind a tall desk in a spacious office. Those days too, slip by on a string of words—precise, neatly packaged, vigilantly administered and distributed. I enjoy using them, and gratitude for the privilege overwhelms me sometimes. But after four days, I lock the office doors, and leave those words behind. They are of little use to a common life, full of pots and tots and simple joys.

Some days in the seven seem like a shoestring and some, a tightrope. Sometimes the beads of those days chip and break off entirely; wasted and useless. Feeling frayed and fragmented, I long for a reminder that I am held together by a stronger Word. By holy string. I know precisely where to find it.

My Bible, its spine worn bare, looks common enough. But its words—nothing common there—pierce me through like filament on fire. No wonder. They are eternal, and they are alive. God—Father, Son, and Holy Ghost—inhabits them. Listen:

In the Beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. (John 1:1)

Not a God, note. Not one of many. God the Creator, and yes, God the destroyer. Melting. Mending. Melding. The Word. Jesus Christ. Full bore, no holds barred. From the beginning, powerful on the page, and through the Holy Spirit, living and active in me—in all his followers.

Fellow follower, even on shoestring, tightrope days, when you don’t feel very held together, believe it: when the beads are flying off, the holy string called the Word remains untouched by our weakness. Suspended between heaven and earth, and threaded through all our common days, the Word is infinitely stronger than a steel cable.

Grab the holy string.

While the Preacher took himself out of province to visit family for a few weeks, I laid a flagstone path to the back garden, hoping to surprise him on his return.

The path didn’t impress him much. He liked it even less when the edge of one stone broke a blade on the riding mower. Then a second blade caught on the same stone, flinging rock shards about like stray bullets. “Hon,” he said, a tad tartly. “Up come the stones.”

So earlier this summer, our grandbeans “helped” dissemble the path. We lugged each stone over to the four foot rise at the bottom of the garden—a defunct sewage mound they’ve dubbed Hope Mountain. (Hope Slope is more like it.)

The fall we moved into Hope House, our eldest grandbean and I planted tulips on the mound. For two springs their bright colours have illuminated that otherwise unattractive, weedy pimple on the prairie. Remembering those tulips brought new vision for both stones and slope.

“Nana,” asked Tabatha, as she lugged the smaller rocks. “Why are we putting these on Hope Mountain?”

“We’re making a rock garden, Butterfly Bean,” I said.

She stood a moment, processing that through her almost five years of Basic Nature Lessons for Newcomers to the Planet.

“Nana.” She spoke firmly. “Rocks don’t grow.”

Farmers may argue that point. I didn’t.

As I pulled up the stones, I noticed tiny red ants scrambling beneath them. Six-year-old Benjamin crouched down, peering curiously. “Nana, are those the biting kind of ants?”

“I’m not sure, Mr. Bean,” said I.

He stood up. Hollered at his sister. “Tabatha, come here.” She did so.

“Sit down right there,” Benjamin ordered, pointing to the angry red swarm. “See if those are the biting kind of ants.”

His canny sibling’s nature lessons kicked in again.

“No, Benjamin,” she said.

Not one to easily desert a quest, my pragmatic Bean tried the next sister down. But three-year-olds grow wise in the way of mischievous elder brothers.

“No, Benjamin,” she said.

Sensing a shortage of willing bottoms, I offered another possibility. “How about you sit down?”

“No, Nana,” he said, his interest in scientific experimentation waning suddenly.

The mower blades eat only grass these days. Chickweed has covered the bare patches left by the stones. The ants remain unclassified. And the stones, as Tabatha predicted, have grown not at all.

But to my delight, Hope Slope’s transformation has inspired a neighbour. “We’ve decided to do the same with our mound,” she said. “I hope you don’t mind.” Mind? Not at all. But I never imagined anyone was watching us solve the little complexities of our life.

I should have known better. In matters of life, as in matters of faith, someone’s always watching. A city set on a hill, Jesus said, cannot be hidden. You are the light of the world, Jesus said. Shine. You are salt, Jesus said. Season.

The best type of witnessing is often the most ordinary kind of living. And preaching isn’t always necessary.

Faced with the choice of going to great lengths to keep our aging pup comfortable, I had to ask myself a hard question one day a while back. In the grand scheme of things, in the balance of human and pet lives, how much is my doggy in my window, the one with the waggly tail, really worth anyway?

Overseas, desperate human strife abounded, begging another question: in a world where human life is increasingly dispensable, and animal life increasingly revered, ought Christ-followers not remind themselves that humans come first? That as much as we value our pets, we must allow God the right to divert our resources, when he sees fit, toward greater human needs? And that sometimes, it all must stop?

Not easy questions for a dog lover.

A few days before, in the pale light of dawn, Mindy—almost nineteen human years—cried in her bed. Never a yapper, Mindy rarely made a sound. But of late, her laments had ululated through our home’s sleeping stillness like ghostly vapors.

I got up, as I had for weeks on end, to lead her out of the washroom, where she slept at night for ease of morning-clean-up of her senior weaknesses.

Lumbering against walls, she nosed her way down the hall, sniffing the floor. In the living room, she stood still, her head pivoting to fireplace, chair, footstool, window. Pausing at each spot.

Though age had rendered Mindy’s eyes and ears almost useless, she seemed to be taking a lingering look over the place she’d called home for all but her first few years. She had done this the evening before, too. Sat on the porch, turning her head slowly from street to sky, from sky to car, from car to house. Recalling, maybe, happily lived sights and sounds: cars passing, children’s laughter, my husband’s shrill whistle. Appreciating the only sense she still seemed to have in abundance—the smells of late dinners, woodsmoke from the neighbours’ chimneys, the lingering fragrance of her own unique trademark on the snow.

I’ve often told family and friends who wonder when it’s time to say farewell to things they’ve loved: “You’ll know it’s time when the pleasure of keeping it is less than the pain of losing it.”

Under her silky grey bangs, Mindy seemed to know it was time. Under mine, I did too. “Come on, old girl,” I said, picking her up.

I don’t think I’ve ever had a harder time making an appointment—and certainly, never had a harder time keeping one. But keep it we did, Mindy, the Preacher, and I, and afterwards carried her body home to be buried with dignity, in gratitude for almost two decades of lively companionship.

In the grand scheme of things, in the balance of human and pet life, how much was my doggy in my window, the one with the waggly tail, really worth anyway? An awful lot. But humanity still carries the trump card—because God says so.

“Mom, come over here. I brought something for you.”

I dawdled over to my daughter.

“Hold out your hand,” she said thrusting a tightly closed fist toward me.

“Uh…does it wiggle?”  I asked, remembering other tightly-closed-fist-presents, including those that buzzed and unwound and chased my poise clean away.

“Just hold out your hand,” she insisted, grinning.

I decided to trust her. After all, not for a decade or so had either one of my children presented me with a living species. Besides, she was a mother now.

When I opened my hand, she did too. Something tiny, glittering and round landed in my palm. I stared, stunned. Then whooped.

I had despaired of ever again seeing that circle of gold with a single diamond, my gift to the Preacher on our wedding day decades earlier. He proved unable to wear a ring of any sort, so I’d adopted it for the largest finger on my right hand. There he could at least see the reminder of his commitment at the altar. I wasn’t about to let him forget that.

When Amanda had asked to borrow the ring as a prop in a musical theatre production, I gave in, but with great reluctance. “I’ll take good care of it, Mom,” she said. But to everyone’s dismay, it went missing on one of the show’s final nights. Too large for her, we assumed it must have slipped off and gotten lost in the confusion of her many costume changes.

Like the woman in one of Jesus’ parables, we scoured every possible hiding place, every remote possibility—for months. But unlike that woman in the Bible who lost, then found, one of her marriage coins, we never held a celebration with our neighbours. The ring, we assumed, was gone forever.

But forever ended several years later, the day our son-in-law, breaking down empty boxes in his garage, lifted one and heard something small roll from one side to the other. Curious, he peered inside. In the dim light of the garage, something glittered. He reached in to pluck it up, amazed to find his father-in-law’s lost wedding ring. I’m wearing it as I click.

Every so often when I look at our rings, I think of those words, spoken so earnestly by two naïve, selfish youth—strangers to us now—almost thirty-five years ago. “For better, for worse, for richer, for poorer. In sickness and in health, till death do us part.”

Like most partners of our vintage, we’ve had better, worse, richer, poorer, sickness and health—all but death, though we both gave fleeting consideration to murder a few times. With God’s help, we’ve grown up together, and with God’s help, we’ve honoured our vows. Like the ring itself, they seem lost sometimes, but they keep showing up, gleaming in dark places when, without a careful second look, it would have been just as easy to toss them. I’m so glad we haven’t.

Happy Anniversary, love.  And thank you, God.

***

Share this sweet reminder of our wedding day, sung here by Paul Stookey (of Peter, Paul, and Mary), sung thirty-five years ago by my own sis.

“I’m not having a heart attack,” I said. But no one listened.

Things move fast when you show up at emergency complaining of chest pain and trouble breathing. So many people checked me out, poking and slapping wires and sticky pads all over the place, that I felt like a cookie crumb at an ant picnic.

I’d told them they could rule out heart attack, right from the start, when the triage nurse asked what I’d been doing when the pain started.

“I was rolling down a hill, and I heard a pop,” I said.

She hesitated, but wrote it down. I don’t recall her asking WHY I was rolling down the hill. And I was so focused on getting a breath, that I didn’t think to tell her I’d spent the morning with my grandbeans, at the playground with the bungalow-high hill plunk in the middle—the perfect rolling hill.

I heard the POP deep in my chest, about three rotations down.

I remember thinking that it wasn’t a good sound, that perhaps I should have left the rolling-down-the-hill-part to the little ones.

Much later, after all that testing proved me right, the X-Ray technician studied my chart. “Rolling down the hill,” he said slowly, adding almost hesitantly, “Um…and were you alone at the time?”

Suddenly I realized I’d just upped the ante for oddball admissions. No wonder so many staff had checked me out.

Some of them may have also, this past winter, have checked out my friend, Noreen. She’s another Nana who forgot her age—a slight bout of amnesia that resulted in a complicated collarbone break during an afternoon of tobogganing with her own grandchildren. She’s still recovering from surgery, and trying to getting used to the steel plate doctors used to repair her.

Fools on the hill, both of us. And, oh, Lord, there are lots of us out there; nanas (and poppas) so in love with our grandchildren we forget our own birth years–and brittling bones.

God, protect not only our little ones, but all the Nanas who forget they’re not. Because at our funerals our heart’s desire is that our grandkids rise up and call us blessed—not that they stand up and sing…“Pop goes the Nana.”

The Preacher and I raised our two children in parsonages provided by God and the churches we served. We called each house home and filled them all with love, delight, chaos and havoc. (Of the best kind, usually. I’ll save the day I almost set fire to one for another column.)

Precisely four years ago, after sixteen years of serving the same congregation, a mosquito bit the Preacher and infected him with West Nile neurological disease. The virus attacked like a band of pirates, paralyzing him in three limbs, ushering him into hospital and out of ministry.

After the Preacher’s six-month hospital stay, I began packing up the parsonage to move to temporary accessible housing across town. I first moved the Preacher himself, still using wheelchair and walker, and unable to help much.

On the day the Preacher read his parting letter to our congregation, a parishioner patted me on the shoulder. “It will be all right,” she said. Easy for you to say, I thought. The tearing felt both sudden and savage. Losses piled up like a pile of bleached bones.

On one of my last days of packing, something joined me in the brick-fronted house God had allowed us to call home: a wall of grief. I wandered through each room, wailing like a moonstruck coyote, re-living sixteen years of family life: Our children sprawled on the floor, tussling with pets. A guest from India cooking curry in the kitchen. Our nine-foot table set for Christmas, surrounded by family and parishioners. A soaped–up pup in the tub. Teen musicians jamming around the piano.  A wedding dress spread on our daughter’s bed.

Memories advanced like flashes from a strobe.

I finally slumped against a living room wall, one I’d painted myself to look like aged plaster, and wondered what would become of us. I had faith that God knew, but I wanted to know too. He stayed mostly silent—except for this Bible verse: “I will lead you by a straight road to a place where you can dwell.”

For the next year and a half, as the local housing market spiraled to an all-time high (and I, to an all-time low) I hunted houses for eighty miles around. “Lord, I don’t have a clue what I’m doing,” I said. “If I’m about to walk through the wrong door, just slam it in my face.” Each time an offer got rejected, I remembered that prayer, and said a prayer of thanks.

Just when hopelessness threatened, I walked through a door that stayed open. A perfect-for-our-needs house in a tiny community with the Biblical name “Ebenezer”—a reminder of God’s help. Fifteen kilometers down a straight highway.

We call our home Hope House. Sometimes we invite people over for conversation and meals. If they’re in need of hope, we tell them our story, and remind them that God is trustworthy. Some tell us they take hope away with them. Life is, indeed, all right.

No matter your situation, keep hope.

The muddle rose from my decision to add colour to our washroom. The room, and everything in it, is white as a Saskatchewan blizzard.

At the store, I chose bold navy and green accessories, including two terry bath mats for the floor, and a rubber one that pictured pebbles for inside the tub. I put that one in and out of my cart several times.

Not until after I got home and had hung the striped shower curtain did I notice the missing tub mat.

“Maybe you didn’t actually buy it.” The Preacher is acquainted with my dithering.

I checked the bill. “Right there. Bath mat, $12.00.”

“We have a pile of lost mats here,” someone at the service counter told me when I called. “Come back, get another one from the shelf, and bring it to the service counter with your bill.”

“I’ll go,” the Preacher said. He headed back to the store, taking along my freshly-arrived brother-in-law.

The phone rang a half-hour later. “We’ve walked every aisle in the bath department a dozen times. We can’t find a pebbly bath mat for $12.00. Neither can the clerk!”

When a bass sounds soprano, you know he’s stressed. “Let me talk to her,” I said.

When I described the mat, she said, “We found a mat with pebbles, but it’s $15.”

Right then, I knew the problem. “Um, could you please check my bill and tell me how many bath mats are on it?”

“Two,” she said.

The two already in my bathroom. My last decision concerning the mat must have been to leave it. Mortified, I explained my menopausal brain lapse, adding, “Please tell my husband to just buy it.”

She hung up, had pity on those two glassy-eyed men, handed the mat to the Preacher and gave him a simple directive, the kind most men appreciate. “Your wife says to just buy it.” Obediently, he headed for the till.

Back home, my thrifty brother-in-law, who didn’t know about the other two mats, told me what happened next. “He was going to just buy it for $15. I told him he’d lose his credit. That he should go back to the service counter and just pay the difference between what they charged you, and its actual price. I saved you some money!”

By now so addled he wouldn’t have known a bath mat from a shower curtain, the Preacher told the service counter clerk what he thought had happened: His wife had bought the mat; it rang in incorrectly, and then hadn’t made it into her bag. He’d come to pick it up and wanted to pay the difference—which he did.

I laughed till I flopped.

A few days later, he set things straight with the store.

“What’d you tell them?” I asked.

“The truth,” he answered, poker-face.

“What, that your wife made you shoplift, and you’d come to make it right?”

“Yep.” He grinned.

Sometimes it doesn’t pay to have a husband with a tender conscience.

***

Prepare tissue, and laugh again with one of our favourite (and most glamourous) funny ladies, Jeanne Robertson:

Don’t Send a Man to the Grocery Store

One of my favourite photos was a drive-by shooting. Pedal-by, more correctly.

The sun had just clambered up the eastern sky as my vintage five-speed and I pedaled past a farm lane.  I could barely see the farmer through the dense row of trees, but he had a rake; seemed to be smoothing the gravel. And the sun hit him just so.

To stop to stare would have seemed impolite, so as I passed I slipped my camera from my pocket, captured the moment, and cycled on by.

I pass that farm fairly often. Not daily, but often enough to have noticed a few things about the man with the rake. He drives a good truck, and his wife drives a little car. Sometimes I hear their dog barking as I pass, but I’ve never once seen it—it’s never running loose.

He treats his cattle well, the man with the rake. Grooms his land. Maintains his sheds. Grows grain that at harvest-time looks like waves on the ocean. Stores enough grain and hay for a long winter.

He works hard. Fixes his fences. Keeps the grass mowed. And he pays attention to little things.

The farmer startled me one day. I didn’t expect to find anyone there; hunched over the grass, fixing something.

Watching his large hands, deft and sure, I commented on a killdeer I’d just seen, and how it tried to coax me away from its eggs by mewing and dragging its wing. Without looking up, he told me, his voice as natural as the grass under him, how much he likes those birds. “I get off the tractor sometimes,” he said, “just to move the eggs.”

Not embarrassed. Just sayin’.

You get to know a little about a man by passing him by every now and then. Not all. Never all. Why he’s in the lane so early? Couldn’t he sleep? Had his wife complained that she would lose her small car in a pot-hole? Was he knocking back the to-do list on the fridge?  Expecting company, perhaps? Had he eaten breakfast? Was he using that time to pray?

A few hundred yards down the road, I hopped off my bike and wandered closer to that man’s cattle, grazing in the field beyond. They lifted their heads, stopped eating, and ambled over to stare at me. I stared back, noticing that their tags dangled not from their ears, but from the thick skin of their chests, like a necklace.

Farmers attach tags soon after a calf enters the world. Tags track vital bovine information, like bloodlines, birth dates and vaccinations. He also keeps careful track of things, the farmer in the lane. The cattle told me that.

You can tell a lot about what people are made of by passing their place every so often. Hearts spill out. Goodness runs over. So does the other stuff. And passersby notice. But lest we judge, let’s remember:

Only God knows the core of a man.

***

The late Paul Harvy wrote a beautiful tribute to some of the finest people among us. Take a moment for “So God Made a Farmer.” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oWpeNAUe5Vw for those reading this column via RSS)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oWpeNAUe5Vw

After our first winter in our home, at the foot of the clothesline cross, I saw rhubarb being born. A triplet of hard pink knots, closely followed by their leaves, chartreuse and tightly crumpled. Scant weeks after the trio first elbowed their way into spring, they stood half the height of the raspberry canes beside them, their leaves wide as a child’s kite.

Two batches of rhubarb ketchup, a few pans of rhubarb crisp, one rhubarb loaf, and a kettle of rhubarb stew later, I began to suspect the plants were Christians, believing as the Bible says, that “It is better to give than receive.”

The Preacher doesn’t eat rhubarb. It falls into his personal food group called Foreign Objects; foods that irritate the baloopa gland (another personal category). Fearing we’d soon be targeted by garden paparazzi and knowing we could never use all that rhubarb, we chopped down two of the plants and churned them deep into the earth.

Three take away two equals one—unless you’re counting rhubarb. Several weeks later, according to its own unique arithmetic, our rhubarb count was four.

This second year in our home, having outsmarted the born-agains with the help of weed-killer, only one rhubarb plant sits at the foot of the raspberry patch. But it has more than compensated for its martyred companions, producing a multitude of arm’s-length stalks, some almost two inches thick at the base, with leaves a good metre across.

“We’d better harvest this stuff,” I said, a tad timidly. So just before it reached the tops of the spruce grove, the Preacher and I approached the rhubarb with knives. I yanked every mature stalk from the plant’s base and manhandled them into the wheelbarrow. The Preacher stood near, hacking off the leaves. “I’m taking it all to Judy,” I said. “I’ve promised her some.”

“Sure.” With a grateful sigh, he watched me drive off.

I found our friend behind her house, bending over the riding lawnmower, her back to me. I called, but she couldn’t hear me over the mower. Halfway across the yard I tried again. Still nothing. Finally, about three feet downwind, and not wanting to scare her by touching her, I called, “Yoo hoo!”

That time she heard. Hollered back, and leapt almost as high as the mower was wide. “I thought you were a skunk!” she managed when we both calmed down. (I’m still puzzling over how a grown woman in green, wearing deodorant and carrying a grocery sack can be mistaken for a black and white, low-slung, odiferous member of the rodent family.)

A week later, our solitary rhubarb plant has begun again. I see it each time I wander over to the raspberry patch to check on our coming crop. Every time I look, it’s larger. Stronger.  Wider. Preparing to give, getting ready to prompt people to share, to eat together, and if they’re really blessed, to laugh.

Lord, make this born-again person more like rhubarb.