God in the storm

I grew up in Tornado Alley. Tornadoes were more of an event I enjoyed than a threat I feared, so invincible did I think I was as a child and teenager. As we gathered in the Shively’s storm shelter with other neighbors, I rather enjoyed the social gathering and naively hoped the twister would somehow be bad enough to cancel school but not destructive enough to hurt anyone.

Questions of why, an inevitable response to suffering, weren’t in my purview, at least not then.

And so I managed to survive my first eighteen years, waltzing through the annual threat of tornado season but not really being affected by any single one of them.

Then I drove home from college for Easter, 1979. Wichita Falls, Texas had been hit by a devastating tornado a few days earlier. In Wichita Falls, they still refer to that day as Terrible Tuesday. A swarm of twisters had slammed the region, killing 42 people in Wichita Falls and 11 in Vernon, Texas, Vernon being just 40 miles from where I grew up in Altus, Oklahoma.

Wichita Falls looked much like a war zone: buildings had been flattened, homes destroyed, debris was strewn everywhere.

I was shocked. “This is terrible, just horrible,” I remember saying over and over. “Why here? Why not out there in one of those wheat fields?”

Tornadoes were no longer something I anticipated with an adrenalin rush; they were something I dreaded and feared.

Turning on the news on the day the tornado struck Moore, Oklahoma, Monday, May 20, 2013, I found myself speaking the same words I did back in 1979: “This is terrible, just horrible.”

My wife’s sister, Lisa, lives in the path the tornado took that day. My brother and his wife just happened to be in Oklahoma City as Joy was undergoing medical tests for her recently diagnosed breast cancer.

Lori and I waited anxiously for news of their safety.

As the reporter told of the Plaza Towers Elementary School that had been leveled while children were still inside, I choked back tears.  

“Couldn’t God have at least directed it around that school?” Lori said to herself aloud.

It was an automatic response, a gut reaction---a question that’s not really a question, but more of a wish---a desire that what we were seeing wasn’t really happening.

It’s the same kind of question I had as I drove through Wichita Falls in 1979.

It’s a desire for a world we don’t live in, a world that doesn’t operate according to natural laws, a place where a Someone intervenes every time there’s danger.

It’s a world where there is no pain or suffering or tears. The Bible calls this place heaven. We aren’t there yet.

We can blame God for this world we live in, filled as it is with contrasts of calming breezes and destructive tornadoes, peaceful waters and powerful hurricanes, life giving rains and devastating floods.

Or we can blame others---maybe even ourselves and our forbears for creating the fossil fuels that warmed the ocean that helped create an environment that seems ever more prone to wild storms.

We can blame the victims, as does Reverend Pat Robertson. In trying to defend God, Robertson asked the people of Moore, Oklahoma: “Why did you build houses where tornadoes were apt to happen?”

Such callousness ignores the possibility of danger everywhere: the East Coast and the Gulf, where there is the possibility of hurricanes, California where the danger is earthquakes, the entire Southwest, where there is drought, the northern states, where ice and snow may kill innocent victims, or the highways, where more deaths occur than in all the storms combined. Why step outside your house, for that matter?

During the Oklahoma tornado, Shayla Taylor was in the Moore Medical Center, ready to give birth to a baby boy. She already had his name picked out: Braeden Immanuel. Aware of the storm, she checked the weather app on her cell phone, only to discover the hospital was in line for a direct hit from the tornado. The nurses took Shayla to a safer room, one without windows. Shayla closed her eyes, and when she opened them, she could clearly see I-35 and the Warren Theatre where there was once a wall. She later delivered her son at a hospital a few miles away. Reflecting on the name of her son,” ‘Immanuel” which means, "God is with us," she said, “I had it picked out for months. And now I know why I did, because God was with us that day.”

Maybe in another world God would have created humans without a free will that allowed them to build a school where a tornado would one day deliver a death notice, a different place where God would constantly be suspending the laws of nature, prohibiting any kind of pain and suffering. Instead he formed this world, the one we live in, the one he lives in too, the one where we find him in the midst of our pain and suffering, here in the storms of life, where he is “Immanuel,” the God who is with us, the One who never leaves us.

There is no one to blame in that.

How I became a tree hugger

“What are you doing, Dad?” my son asked when he called me on his cell phone.

I was sitting on our back patio, admiring the work I’d done, having just planted the first third of my garden with the non-genetically modified seeds I had oh-so carefully selected. I wanted to come as close as I could to having an organic garden.

Then just as I as I leaned back to relax, I stood up straight, squinting at the tractor spraying the field behind my house. It was coming closer and closer to my garden.

“Well,” I told Dave in answer to his question, “I’m thinking about all the time and money I spent making sure I had non-GMO seeds so I could watch them get sprayed with pesticides.”

A few minutes later, while I was in the garage transplanting some of my tomato plants and placing them back in my miniature green house, I heard Lori scream: “He’s right up against the fence now.”

There are several responses to a perceived environmental threat.

There’s the “Oh well, surely they know what they’re doing” response. I like that one because it avoids confrontation. But unfortunately, it ignores potential danger.

 For years, crop dusters in Southwest Oklahoma, where I grew up, sprayed DDT and other pesticides. Some of the pesticides many crop dusters used have been linked as possible causes of certain cancers, like the one my oldest brother now fights, mantle cell lymphoma. Two of his high school friends have died from that cancer.

As award winning author Pete Daniel notes in his book, Toxic Drift, Pesticides and Health in the Post- WWII South, “After World War II, scientists failed to investigate the long term possibilities of toxic drift but instead focused on inventions and new products. They were willing to allow the future to take care of itself.”

Then there’s the more radical response reminiscent of Occupy Wall Street. I could set up a tent in the field, call it Occupy the Farm, and phone some lonely newspaper reporter in hopes that someone would take my picture standing in front of my tent while I’m holding my sign, “I have a say: no more chemical spray.”

Maybe there’s another way. I simply wanted to know if the spray was potentially harmful and what my options would be if it were. In the words of Jean Rostand, as quoted in Rachel Carson’s classic work, Silent Spring, “The obligation to endure gives us the right to know.”

“Yes,” I said, “I surely have a right to know.” So in that instant, I made a decision and gently placing my tomato seedling back in the green house,  I marched like Don Quixote across my back yard, convinced I could simply hail the sprayer like I would a taxi and casually inquire, “What’s in that stuff?”

I never made it past my own yard.

The barbed wire fence grabbed me, holding me captive like Gulliver tied down by the Lilliputians. So there I was, instead of defending my garden, lying lamely in the fence with the seat of my pants and the front legs ripped apart. What’s more, I could hear the hum of the sprayer approaching, and I envisioned him dousing me with chemicals while cackling, “Serves ya right, ya puny little tree hugger.”

Instead he suddenly turned in the opposite direction, and sensing my opportunity to break for it, I pulled myself out of the barbed wire and dashed to my car.

“Where on earth are you going?” Lori hollered as I drove in the direction of the sprayer’s barn.

 “The obligation to endure gives us the right to know,” I shouted as I sped away.

She looked puzzled.

Afraid to expose my back side with my torn pants hopelessly exposing my underwear, I stood face to face with the sprayers. We had an amiable conversation. They had waited until the wind had died down to avoid any potential drift of the herbicide they were spraying.  Having expressed my concerns, we shook hands, and I scooted home to treat my barbed wire wounds.

Later, a County Extension Agent informed me that their spray was most likely one of the more benign herbicides, essentially a form of Round-Up. And the common law in most states is that neither farmers nor neighbors are obligated to inform others what they are spraying.

But I still wonder about potential toxic drift: If it can harm plants, do I really want to eat them once they’ve been exposed to the chemicals? And how do I know it won’t harm me sometime in the future? Or am I just being paranoid and over reactive?

Some states, I learned, have laws stipulating that herbicides and pesticides cannot be sprayed in the vicinity of a school.

“Aha,” I thought.  I could see a school next to my garden: “The Whitlock Academy of Safe Gardening.”

First course: “Tree Hugging 101.”

Are you the bad neighbor?

Will there be fences in heaven?

That’s another way of asking, will your bothersome neighbor’s heavenly mansion be next to yours? Before you petition heaven’s city council for a privacy fence or request that your bad neighbor be confined to the eternal promised land’s back forty, make sure you yourself aren’t unwittingly the neighbor from hell who somehow slipped under the pearly gates unnoticed while St. Peter was distracted by a game of heavenly baseball.

It is possible that you might be the neighbor who simply doesn’t get it. Could you be the annoying neighbor?

Take the case of Barry Alan Swegle, who as of last week has some new neighbors: his cellmates in the Clallam County jail in Washington. Swegle faces felony charges of malicious mischief. Mr. Swegle didn’t like the fact that a neighbor had placed a fence in a disputed area of Swegle’s property line, preventing him from moving his heavy equipment on and off his property. One such piece of equipment was a bulldozer.

So, Swegle decided to put the bulldozer to good use. Before it was all over, he had bulldozed four of his neighbors’ homes, a boat, a truck, a tractor, and had brought down a 70 foot electricity pole.

Maybe you’ve at least fantasized about doing something like Barry did. Perhaps your weapon of revenge isn’t a bulldozer but nails under the tires of that pesky neighbor’s car, or a snake in their mailbox, or a parrot that repeats obscenities to them.  All these retaliatory scenarios have actually been utilized by one neighbor against another.

I wouldn’t know how to drive a bulldozer. But I can ring a doorbell.

And that’s what I did to one of my neighbors, late one night, years ago.

The doorbell rang Doris’ apartment. She lived next to my wife and me when I was in graduate school. Doris would apparently fall asleep and leave her TV blaring. The paper thin walls of the apartment complex were no match for the volume of Doris’ TV.  I could easily hear the 11 o’clock news, followed by the midnight sports summary, followed by the 1am sneak preview of the next day’s weather. Sometimes it went on all night.

I tried the polite route. “Doris, would you please turn down your TV before you fall asleep?”

When that approach failed, I tried persistence, while remaining patient and polite. “Doris, we can still hear your TV. Would you please turn it down?”

 Finally I lost patience, and with the patience went my politeness. Only the persistence remained, which I applied to the doorbell.

Storming down the stairs, I rang Doris’ doorbell again and again and again until she finally appeared at the top of the stairs, her hair pulled up above her head like a warrior’s headdress, her facial night cream looking like war paint, and with her tightly folded arms resting across her chest and her feet firmly planted at hips width distance, she had the appearance of a matriarchal chieftain ready to defend her throne.

But with my index finger still on her doorbell, I too was ready for battle.

“If I turn down my TV, I won’t be able to hear it,” she argued.  

“Tell you what,” I rejoined, “if you can’t hear it in your bedroom, just step into ours, and you can hear every word just fine.”

She slammed her door. By then, other tenants were peeking out in curiosity.

Taking my finger off the doorbell, I retreated.

Not even the landlord’s intervention would quell Doris’ TV. We didn’t get a reprieve from the late night news until Doris moved out.

I later wondered if there was there something about me Doris just didn’t like. Could it have been that I annoyed her? Was she retaliating against me? Was the loud TV her bulldozer?

It’s comforting to believe that in heaven we will have perfect neighbors, so we won’t need fences to keep someone’s pets from pooping on our heavenly lawns, or sound proof walls to silence a neighbor’s rock n roll, or bulldozers to adjust our property lines.

Robert Frost’s line from his poem, “Mending Wall,” is often quoted as a reason for having fences: “Good fences make good neighbors.” The irony is that Frost was challenging the very wisdom of that phrase.

We can’t have heaven on this earth where we are often too closely meshed together. But maybe we would do better in approximating it if we would take a closer look at ourselves and ask how we might mend a wall rather than building one.

Or bulldozing it.

What Mama said…and what she didn't

Growing up, my mother was like a lighthouse to me: Her light was always on, a beacon guiding me through the daily adventures and the bumps and bruises of childhood and adolescence. At the end of the day, she was always there, welcoming me to the safe harbor that was my home.

Years later, when I left for other places, and the home lights were but a distant flicker, I would remind myself of Mom’s words. And often, they would light my path.

“Always make your bed, and remember, if the sheet is crumpled, the bedspread won’t look straight either.” What’s beneath the surface, she explained to me when I was first learning how to make my bed, matters--- even though it’s unseen. I still think of those words every now and then when I’m having trouble getting the bed sheet straight or having one of “those days” when everything that’s not nailed down is coming loose and feelings like anger, fear, or impatience are crumpling the calmness beneath the surface of my life.

“Always pray before breakfast.” Actually Mom would do the praying; I did the listening. But I learned. And it would become a lifelong habit. During some of those teenage years, I squirmed and twisted. Listening to Mom’s prayers wasn’t part of my agenda, so anxious was I to bolt out the door and race to life’s fast lane where prayer wasn’t necessary, I thought. But eventually, I came back to the breakfast table.

 “Time for dinner.” It’s been said that he who never leaves home thinks mama is the only cook, but Mom’s cooking was the best, at least to me. Dinner meant more than eating. Our family sat around the table, sharing the events of the day, and Mom and Dad listened as my older brothers and I might recount what happened at football practice or how someone pulled a funny prank in school. I've tried to pass the dinner table on to my kids.

“Did you do your best?” The first time I recall hearing that question was in the third grade when I brought home a less than admirable report card. I knew the answer was “no,” I hadn't  I carried that question to college and beyond, and frequently ask it to myself at the end of the day.

“We love you, no matter what.” Love if it’s truly love, is unconditional. Those words followed me and brought me back home, even when I had failed miserably and disappointed others. I've tried as best I could to live those words in my own home.

I’m thankful for Mom’s words, but like Erma Bombeck said of her mother, I’m also grateful for the times Mom didn’t speak, the times when she was silent. Bombeck appreciated her mother’s silence during the times when Erma fell flat on her face, or made a poor decision, or took a stand that she had to pay for dearly. “I thank her for all her virtues,” Bombeck wrote, “but mostly for never once having said, ‘I told you so.’"

When the night is darkest and the shore line can’t be seen, maybe it will be the silence that speaks the loudest, directing us home where love and acceptance are spoken without words. 

And maybe this Sunday, Mother’s Day, I’ll call Mom and remind her of what she said…and what she didn't.

Crazy or just hootchie cootchie googooing?

Standing at the end of the aisle in the department store, I heard loud noises from someone coming closer. “Woo who, boo boo, waahhh waahhh.”

The weird sounds were coming from a lady walking down the aisle. And the closer she got to me, the louder her babbling became. She looked to be 60 something, and the younger woman following close behind her I assumed to be the older lady’s 20 something daughter. “Poor lady,” I thought. “She must have some disability and is unable to control her voice. Or perhaps she’s mentally challenged, and the caring daughter is taking her mom shopping.

Then I noticed the daughter was wearing one of those forward-facing-out baby carriers. Only the baby wasn't in it. Taking a second look at the lady talking gibberish, I could see she was looking down at something. Sure enough, the lady wasn't speech impaired, nor was she mentally unstable. She was just talking to her grand-baby in the stroller that had been hidden from my view.

When we hear someone in a public place unashamedly jabbering, we are likely to conclude that person either has a diminished mental capacity or is simply obnoxious. But with a baby there, the person suddenly becomes a normal, loving parent or grandparent communicating with a child.

Most of us who have spent any time in the presence of an infant have talked in those baby tones. After a Sunday morning worship service, I might start speaking in another language if my daughter, Madi, brings my eight month old grandson, Eli, from the church nursery to me.

 “Hoothcie, gootchie, goo,” I say to him while tickling his chin. It doesn't bother me that some of the people to whom I've just preached are standing close to me. In fact, they join me in the baby babble. In a less formal public setting--- our Wednesday night fellowship meal---I've actually sung a line to Eli from one of his favorite tunes, the Mickey Mouse Clubhouse “Hot Dog” song. I somehow transition from mouthing, “Hot dog/hot dog/ hot diggety dog” to teaching my Bible study on the book of Revelation. It’s the only time my congregation let’s me sing solo; a giggling Baby Eli makes it okay. 

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In the presence of an infant we can discard our roles and titles: “Student, administrative assistant, Dr., CEO, teacher, manager,” and become a kid for a moment. As long as the baby is there, we’re fine. Otherwise, our sanity would likely be in question.

And here’s something else: Some research seems to indicate that this infant directed talk is not only fun for adults but healthy for the baby. It’s subject to debate, but some scientists contend that baby directed speech can help lay the foundation for language development. Engaging in this form of communication can enhance the infant’s ability to understand and learn, some believe. Repeating those “goo goo” and gaa gaa,” sounds back to the child, and even using a playful voice while enunciating them, can help babies learn sounds.

I’m glad my “cootchie cootchie coos” might help Eli’s language development. But that’s not why I talk like that to him. It’s a way I can enter into his world---connecting, communicating, and loving him.

Maybe it’s in our DNA to do that; it seems to come naturally. Infant directed speech appears cross culturally, although not universally.

Then again, perhaps we learned it from a higher source. The Protestant reformer, Martin Luther, is supposed to have said that when God speaks to us, he speaks in baby talk. I suppose Luther meant God bends down to our level because we are helpless to know him unless he finds a way to communicate with us. Like a baby to an adult, we are dependent on God to stoop to us if we are to hear from him.

It’s a movement of love. And that’s reason enough for me to play the fool, cooing, oohing, and ahhing my way into the baby’s world, loving him into a relationship where we know and understand each other better and better the more we talk and listen to one another.