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.

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.”