Month: November 2012

don’t do this (a “just for fun” post)

/ jdunderwood / Leave a comment

We get conflicting messages about food this time of year. Yummy-looking recipes pop up on one side of my computer screen, and on the other I see dieting tips for “getting through the holidays without gaining a pound.” I don’t really have any advice of my own to add other than this: no matter HOW you choose to approach eating this holiday season, don’t force your approach on someone else.

A long time ago, when I was teaching at a public middle school in a middle-sized town in Indiana, one of my fellow teachers came up with the great idea of having a holiday lunch potluck. We were a somewhat divided set of teachers, with a few very quirky ones in the bunch, and others who were just downright disgruntled much of the time. We didn’t do much all together, except share a lot of gossip in the workroom and fuss about problem students. The teacher with the potluck idea was one of the few cheerful ones, and surprisingly, everyone got on board. (It probably helped that she planned the potluck for a day when we would teach in the morning, send the kids home, and then have an afternoon of on-site meetings. Most probably thought that the potluck would spill over into the meeting time, cutting it short.)

That morning we carried our crockpots and goodies into the library, placing them on a large table where the librarian (they were still called that back then–no “media specialists” yet) had set up a complicated system of heavy -duty extension cords so we could plug all the crockpots in. We perused the table of goodies and looked forward to a delicious lunch.

Surprisingly our local health nut had offered to set up more tables and spread out the offerings just before lunchtime. We thought it was just because she had her last period free.

Um, no.

When we walked in the library at lunchtime, drawing in deep appreciative breaths of the rich smells, we discovered placards in front of each dish. At the top of each placard was the name of the dish–helpful–and at the bottom were listed the calories, fat grams, and serving size of it.

That part was not so great.

Some dishes even had little notes: “Watch out–high calories.” “You’ll want to go lightly with this one.”

This wasn’t New York City. Gourmet cooking had not made many inroads into our town. The tables weren’t covered in salads (unless it was three-bean or potato) but in comfort food.

GOOD comfort food.

Needless to say, this dampened the mood, and our health nut received a lot of dark looks.

SO, over-indulge or hold back this holiday season, that’s YOUR decision.

Just don’t make someone else feel guilty for doing either.

 

It’s like a fact!

/ jdunderwood / 2 Comments

I think he took this picture himself using my computer. All I know is that I opened my computer the other day to find this picture as my background–compliments of his older sister, I’m sure! Love it!

The other morning I opened the devotional book Jesus Calling to read it aloud to Dave as he ironed his shirt.

“Oh, I have a hard time believing that most of the time,” I said—before I’d even read the first sentence.

“Believing what?” Dave asked.

“Here’s what it says,” I answered. “’I am pleased with you, My child.’ And listen to this: ‘You don’t have to perform well in order to receive My Love.’ Ouch!”

Forty-five minutes later I was in the middle of my workout when son Jake came down to the basement and did what he always does in the early mornings when none of his other siblings are yet stirring: he went straight to the couch and cuddled with our dog, Chai.

“Oh, Chai,” he said, his voice syrupy sweet. “You’re such a good girl. What a good girl you are!”

Feeling a bit like chopped liver—I hadn’t even rated a “hello”—and in the middle of a huffing, puffing part of my workout, I asked, “What has she done to make her a good girl, Jake? She’s just lying there.”

He looked up, his face surprised. “Mom, I love her. That’s what makes her good!”

Wow!

I love her. That’s what makes her good.

I am pleased with you, My child.

I guess God really wanted to drive the lesson home.

Ephesians 2:8 “For it is by free grace (God’s unmerited favor) that you are saved (delivered from judgment and made partakers of Christ’s salvation) through [your] faith. And this [salvation] is not of yourselves [of your own doing, it came not through your own striving], but it is the gift of God;”

I like how the Amplified version puts it: “not through your own striving.” Oh, I strive. And I beat myself up and assume that God feels the same as I do when all my efforts come up short or are revealed to be what they are—things done to make me feel good about myself.

At bedtime the other night, Patrick said something hurtful about a group of people. He said it without thought, just to be talking, but I didn’t let it slide. “Do you realize how hurtful those words were? Do you realize what you were saying?”

When I explained, he DID understand.

And he felt awful.

When I went into his room to kiss him goodnight, his cheeks were tear-stained and he wouldn’t look at me.

I rubbed his head, and he turned his face to me and asked, “Mommy, do you still love me after what I said?”

Man, when any of your kids say that—but especially your adopted baby—it stops the heart!

“Oh, sweetheart,” I said—when I could say anything, “nothing’s going to change my love for you. I Love You! It’s like a fact.”

He loves me!

He loves you!

It’s like a fact.

Shopping advice? From me?

/ jdunderwood / 1 Comment

No one—and I mean no one—comes to me for Christmas shopping advice.

I’m not a good shopper at any time of the year. As my husband and older daughter say, “You start grumpy and just get worse.” They generally refuse to go with me—especially if they know the stores will be crowded.

Despite this, though, I’m actually going to share some shopping tips in this blog entry.

If you like the idea of giving gifts that give back, then you might be interested in some of these very cool businesses and nonprofits that allow you to do just that. Giving these items won’t help you to buy more with less money, but you’ll know that every purchase enables an organization to do more for someone who desperately needs hope.

IF YOU’RE SHOPPING FOR PRETEENS/TEENS

Check out www.mudlove.com. This company, based in Winona Lake, Indiana (home of my wonderful in-laws and my alma mater, Grace College), sells made-on-site clay bracelets and necklaces. The most popular version is stamped with a word or phrase, and you can even custom order a word or phrase that has particular meaning to you. Twenty percent of each purchase goes to provide clean water in Africa, and $5 spent provides an African with clean drinking water for a year. My girls (ages 8, 12, 13, and 15) ALL love them.

www.entertheventure.com doesn’t have a whole lot of items for sale, but I love the heart behind this small nonprofit, which was started by some young friends of ours. They have African-made bracelets and necklaces made out of rolled paper. If you haven’t seen these, don’t think, “Paper? Tacky.” They’re NOT. Plus, each one purchased helps support two children’s homes in Africa: Jerusalem Children’s ministry and Springs of Hope.

BIG-TICKET BEAUTY

www.handandcloth.com sells gorgeous, one-of-a-kind blankets made from used saris by women rescued from the slave trade in Bangladesh. I’ve featured this ministry before on my blog (https://journeytojen.wordpress.com/2012/09/27/blankets-handmade-by-women-women-handmade-by-god/).  These are perfect buys for the person who appreciates beautiful, handmade artisan items (hmm—maybe that describes you yourself!). They start at $98 dollars and go up to around $200. Check out the blankets at the website—which itself is beautiful—and read their story while you are there. “Blankets handmade by women. Women handmade by God.” Wonderful work!

TWO OTHERS FOR WOMEN AT RISK

If you want something other than blankets made by women rescued from the slave trade, visit www.warinternational.org. The acronym WAR, standing for Women at Risk, was started in 2006. You can find jewelry, accessories, home décor, and children’s items made by women in 13 countries, including the United States.

www.stoptraffickfashion.com has t-shirts, jewelry, and totes/bags made from recycled materials. Many of their t-shirts express the heart of the women who run this website. One with a barcode also has the logo “People are not products” and several sport the logo “free.loved.radiant.”

LITTLE BIT OF EVERYTHING

Need to shop for kids, men, women—want to spend a little for this one, more for that one? Go to www.tenthousandvillages.com. Gorgeous jewelry, decorative items, and woven/knitted items for women; toys and games for children; even things like chess sets, bookends, and bicycle-chain frames for men. Their website is very easy to navigate and has some very helpful tools. If you click on the “gift ideas” tab at the top of the page, you can shop for holiday items, for men, women, or children, or by type of item.  You can spend a little (items as low as $4) or a lot. They also have shops (there is one near me in Glen Ellyn, IL). You can find a shop locater on the website.

FOR THE COFFEE LOVERS

Land of a Thousand Hills Coffee Company has “Drink Coffee. Do Good” as its motto. It started with farmers in Rwanda (the founder saw the effects of the genocide and had to do SOMETHING) and now works with farmers in Haiti and Thailand as well. They sell 100% Arabica, fairly traded, fresh roasted coffee. They sell ground, whole bean, and decaf, teas, and coffee accessories at www.landofathousandhills.com.

LOOKING FOR HANDCRAFTED CROCHETED ITEMS?

My husband just told me about this one, and I checked it out and love their website. What a great story! A group of high school guys learned to crochet simply because they wanted unique ski hats on the local slopes. Others dubbed them the Krochet Kids. Long story short (if you want to know the whole thing, visit the website), they taught these skills to women in northern Africa and then Peru, and they sell these handmade items at www.krochetkids.org. Each item carries with it the signature of the woman who crocheted it, and you can visit the website to learn her story.

AND, FINALLY, FOR THE PERSON WHO HAS EVERYTHING

Buy them a goat—bet they don’t have that. Seriously, go to  www.worldvision.org or www.compassion.com and look under “ways to give.” The gift catalog has items like school supplies, ducks, and clean-water wells. You can honor someone with your gift, and that person will receive a card telling about your gift and what it will accomplish.

ANY OTHER IDEAS???

If you have other ideas, please leave a comment and share! I’d love to hear your ideas.

Thanks for reading! I sure enjoyed pulling the list together.

Love language: gift giving!

/ jdunderwood / 1 Comment

Here are two of my crazy gifts! Maddie and PJ playing in a mud puddle!

Gift giving is NOT my love language, but one of my friends sure has it. When she gives me a present, her eyes sparkle. I know she received enjoyment in every step of the picking out/wrapping/presenting process, and it culminates when I open it and recognize that it was specifically planned for me.

God is like my friend. He LOVES to give us gifts. He intricately designed our bodies—that was a gift. So was the beautiful world we inhabit. These “common” graces we enjoy every day (not so common, really) are ongoing presents.

Then there is the carefully planned, sacrificial gift of His Son! That’s a gift that boggles our puny minds. That was a gift given through tears, God holding out to us His very soul, though His heart throbbed with pain.

He gave THAT gift so He could continually give. Jesus told His disciples when He left Earth that He was leaving them a present. The Comforter (boy, do we need a Comforter!) would provide the constant, never-failing Presence of God in our very hearts!

WOW! Cool gift! But somehow I forget about this Comforter, this Holy Spirit that stirs inside me.

So God gives me “little” gifts each and every day to remind me that I have HIM.

This day will be crazy busy. I knew that from the moment I woke up. But it has already been chock-full of gifts. I got to wake two of my children up, kissing soft lips still full with sleep. On the drive to school a hawk swooped above the car, close enough we saw individual feathers on its taut wings. We drove our favorite route, and the cattails shone against the grey sky and the beech leaves fluttered silver in the soft breeze.

These were not accidental gifts. God holds time and space. He’s better than the director of The Truman Show who could say, “Okay, Truman is about to cross the street. Cue ray of sunshine, bird song, and brightly colored leaves falling to earth right..NOW.”

God literally plans these kinds of gifts for me every day. That hawk was a present, timed perfectly so that I saw it. He LOVES to give me these gifts. He is like my gift-giving friend, taking joy when I take joy in what He gives.

And each “small” gift is a reminder that He has much, much bigger ones available for me. He’s knocking on the door of my heart. “Let me come in and BE with you.” He doesn’t duck out when I encounter something hard or frustrating. He doesn’t say, “You’ve blown it, so no more gift of My Presence.”

His gifts to us are all pictures of the greatest gift of Himself: the same yesterday, today, and forever, YET new and fresh in beauty and depth.

God, the Gift Giver!

Value in/value out–and guilt begone!

/ jdunderwood / 4 Comments

I am GOOD at guilt.

I can make myself feel guilty for just about anything: not being a good enough mom/host mom (or wife, not sharing my faith enough, not doing enough for others… My husband and kids actually tease me about this. One night a couple weeks back, Dave asked me, “Now why did you feel you had to be a chaperone for the kindergarten field trip along with volunteering in the school cafeteria today?”

Before I could answer, my 12-year-old did it for me. “Because that’s what ‘good moms’ do, Dad.”

Bam! Right between the eyes. Good moms—and Christians, neighbors, whatever—do “enough,” and “bad” ones run around trying to figure out what the heck “enough” is and drowning in guilt in the meantime.

One of my recurring areas of guilt wallowing is in relation to the “least” of the world. When I am reminded of the number of orphans in the world or refugees in DuPage county (my home county), part of me wants to run away, to not be touched by knowledge that disrupts my comfort. Fortunately, as God softens my heart, I am increasingly led to pray, to actually feel sorrow that draws me closer to the heart of God.

But there’s another part of me that goes straight to the guilt button.

Last week I wrote three posts about the “least” of the world. I didn’t plan it. They all came out of natural events of my week, and it was not my intention to induce guilt—neither in anyone else nor in myself.

But being the guilt expert I am, it was bound to happen.

The I’m not doing enough. I’m not giving enough chorus was ready for the Metropolitan Opera by the end of the week. 

At the beginning of this week, though, I was reminded that God doesn’t like my guilt wallowing. He doesn’t want a heart that coerces its holder into good deeds. He wants a soft, tender, compassionate heart.

He wants a heart like His.

He didn’t send His Son to die because He felt guilty. He did it because He values us. He loves us not for what WE have done but because that is WHO He is.

He values us not as the world does—for our power, our wealth, or our talents—but because He has stamped His image into each human creation.

You are mine, He breathed into Adam and then sorrowed as, one after another, we turned our back on that truth. He still holds our existence, but He wants our hearts.

Each human being has value because God says so.

God woke me up (literally) from my guilt fest last week. In the middle of the night I startled awake with His Words sounding in my mind: “You are mine. You have value because I love you. When you know THIS, it can flow out of you and you can value others. This will show them that I love them.”

“Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit. Rather, in humility value others above yourselves.” Philippians 2:3.

My guilt is a twisted form of vain conceit. It is focused on ME, and it assumes that I can somehow fix the problem, that I have enough knowledge to fix it—if I just think hard enough, if I just do enough. Though it can get masked as something wholly good, it is at its core a false humility—conceit in a prettier package.

But the desire to do good that flows out of God, now that happens when I remember that I am valued—loved immensely—and not for anything I am or can do. THIS knowledge allows me to VALUE others, not just “do good” to assuage my self-centered conscience. Then I can pass value on without losing a smidgen of it myself.

This is something I can do this every single day. I don’t have to be working with refugees or working overseas at an orphanage. I can practice this with the clerk at the grocery store, with the hygienist at the dentist office, with the homeless guy holding the sign on the street corner, and the loud, off-center woman who wears sweaters in July and hangs out at the public library. I can even do it with my friends and family.

Philippians 2:4 reminds me how to do this: “Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others.” I have to stop thinking that my to-do list is more important than people. I must be willing to set it aside. I cannot walk through the grocery store with a preoccupied look on my face, thinking only of what I’m fixing for dinner and putting in lunches. I must be willing to look into each face, see each as a human being valued by God, and engage—a smile, a look, a few words, kindness most of all.

Value in, value out.

And if I practice this in “small” ways, listening for the promptings of God as I move through my everyday life, then God makes “big” ways clear as well. “Eagerly pursue and seek to acquire [this] love [make it your aim, your great quest];” (I Corinthians 14:1a, Amplified).

Value in—I am loved.

Value out—so I can love others.

And guilt begone!

points of the compass

/ jdunderwood / Leave a comment

This is an image I downloaded from the Voice of the Martyrs website (with their permission). The man on the left is Christian Bounchan Kanthavong, who spent 13 years and eight months in prison in Laos for his faith. On the right is the actor who portrays him in a video made by VOM that tells his story.

Today is the International Day of Prayer for the Persecuted Church. If you want to read more about the persecuted church, I suggest the Voice of the Martyrs website (www.persecution.com). Along with great resources and a regularly published newsletter,the VOM website allows you to sign up for weekly prayer updates that will help you to pray specifically (I don’t know about you, but my generalized prayers don’t pack a lot of oomph). VOM also has a really cool letter-writing opportunity. If you go to http://www.prisoneralert.com, you can pick an imprisoned fellow believer and choose phrases to create a letter to encourage that person. The site translates the phrases, you print them, and then you can send the letter to the address the site provides.

Another website is http://www.opendoorsusa.org, and http://www.persecutedchurch.org has an even fuller list of organizations (and their websites) that support the persecuted church.

This morning in church we read Revelations 7:9-11: “…there before me was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people and language, standing before the throne and before the Lamb. They were wearing white robes and were holding palm branches in their hands. 10 And they cried out in a loud voice: “Salvation belongs to our God, who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb.” 11 All the angels were standing around the throne and around the elders and the four living creatures. They fell down on their faces before the throne and worshiped God, 12 saying: “Amen! Praise and glory and wisdom and thanks and honor and power and strength be to our God for ever and ever. Amen!” 13 Then one of the elders asked me, “These in white robes—who are they, and where did they come from?” 14 I answered, “Sir, you know.” And he said, “These are they who have come out of the great tribulation; they have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.15 Therefore, “they are before the throne of God  and serve him day and night in his temple; and he who sits on the throne will shelter them with his presence. 16 ‘Never again will they hunger; never again will they thirst. The sun will not beat down on them,’[a] nor any scorching heat. 17 For the Lamb at the center of the throne will be their shepherd; ‘he will lead them to springs of living water.’[b] ‘And God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.’[c]”

Earlier this week I ran across a hymn by John Oxenham (1852-1941) that reminded me of the incredible family connection we have with believers in Christ all across the earth. I’m sharing it here:

IN CHRIST THERE IS NO EAST OR WEST

In Christ there is no east or west,

In Him no south or north;

But one great fellowship of love

Throughout the whole wide earth.

In Him shall true hearts everywhere

Their high communion find;

His service is the golden cord

Close binding all mankind.

Join hands, then brothers of the faith,

Whate’er your race may be.

Who serves my Father as a son

Is surely kin to me.

In Christ now meet both east and west,

In Him meet south and north;

All Christly souls are one in Him

Throughout the whole wide earth.

Refugee Joseph

/ jdunderwood / 1 Comment

This morning I subbed as an aide for one of the World Relief English-as-a-Second Language (ESL) classes that meet in Wheaton. Refugees from well over a dozen countries come together with a single goal: to improve the language skills that will enable them to assimilate more into U.S. culture. Some want to go to college for the first time. Others hope to validate degrees they earned in their home countries that carry no weight here. Mothers come hoping to be able to communicate with their children’s teachers or even simply to talk with the clerk at the grocery store.

They all have stories; the U.N. doesn’t label just anyone a “refugee,” and it doesn’t relocate most —far from it—across the globe. There have to be reasons, good ones, considering that, if given a viable choice between returning home or going to the United States, almost all of these refugees would choose their homeland. But home—and the family still there—is not a realistic option.

Today, during the small chapel break that splits the class into two halves, several aides acted out the story of Joseph. I stood next to a young mother of two. We chatted before the skit began, and I learned her young boys’ names and ages. Her husband, who was a photographer at home, is now working part-time construction, hoping to get full-time, hoping, somehow, to return to the work he really enjoys.

The skit began and we watched as Joseph was thrown into the well and sold into slavery and his father was given the news of his death. “Joseph had many troubles in Egypt” was used to fast-forward the narrative to his interpretation of Pharoah’s dreams and his promotion to being the second in command. Then his brothers came looking for grain. Joseph had to turn aside to weep, but he did not tell them who he was. Then the brothers came again, this time bringing Benjamin, Joseph’s younger brother, the only other child of Joseph’s beloved mother Rachel. Joseph hugged him and cried. He forgave his other brothers. The audience, filled with the small sounds of tea drinking and softly murmured comments before, was completely still now.

The woman who narrated the story looked out at the audience. “You have all been through hard times. Many of you are going through difficult times now. Remember that there is a God who is good. Hold onto what Joseph said: ‘You meant it for evil, but God meant it for good.’ He is a good God. You can cling to that. He can work good out of what you are going through.”

Next to me I could hear the young mother crying. I’m sure many faces in front of me were wet as well.

I hugged the young mother, and we filed back to classes far more quietly than we had come in. One of the teachers and I made eye contact. “Somehow means a lot more in this context, doesn’t it?” she said.

Yes, it does.

Great numbers of the least

/ jdunderwood / Leave a comment

Joseph Stalin reportedly said, “A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic,” and there’s a lot of truth to that statement. In the last week I’ve been reminded of a lot of numbers. I’m going to spout a few of them at you in the next couple of paragraphs but please know that the numbers are not the focus.

On Saturday I attended a training seminar at our local World Relief center (http://worldrelief.org/). Did you know there are 43.7 MILLION refugees in the world? Eighty percent of them are women and children.

On the radio last week I listened to an interview with Kathi Macias, an author who has written a fiction series on sex slave trafficking around the globe. More than 27 million slaves live in our world now. Two million of them are children exploited in the sex slave trade. This trade touches nearly every single country in the world and has a very real presence in the United States—not just in cities but in small towns as well (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/corban-addison/modern-slavery_b_1214371.html) (http://kathimacias.com/kathis-books/).

On Saturday night—and again on Sunday—I spent time with Wilfred Rugumba, who is very special to our family. Wilfred is the director of the orphanage where Patrick, our youngest, lived before becoming an Underwood (http://www.mercychildcare.org/). Wilfred reminded me that there are between 143 and 210 million orphans in the world. The number of orphans in sub-Saharan Africa is greater than the total number of children in Denmark, Norway, Ireland, Canada, and Sweden.

Those are overwhelming statistics! Obviously they overlap—a lot. Many of those refugees are also orphans. Many orphans are the ones abducted into the slave trade. But regardless of how you slice and dice it, it adds up to a lot of people. A lot of hurting people.

Sometimes I can forget these numbers. I can go for a few days, a week, maybe two without actively remembering that every minute people are being abused, sold, orphaned, displaced, and widowed. There have been other times in my life, though, when I have felt paralyzed by the thought of the vicious evil being done in any given moment.

It is in those moments when I have been reminded that God NEVER forgets. I CAN forget. I can get wrapped up in my days that are filled with activity. But God never forgets. If He knows the number of hairs on my head, He certainly knows the numbers of those being abused and exploited. He knows exactly how many stomachs are hungry. He knows how many children are wailing or dazed with grief over dead parents. And they are not just numbers to Him. They are faces, hearts, and souls to Him! And He is present in their pain. He is there when the young girl or boy is sold for sex. He is there when the widow watches her child grow listless and blank-eyed because hunger has dulled everything. He sees every village that is marauded for political or ethnic reasons.

He was there during the Armenian massacres, and there during the Holocaust and there during the Rwandan and Cambodian and Bosnian genocides and others we don’t even know about. He is in Darfur today.

And He is not untouched.

My God, what a heart You must have! We cannot blame you for these atrocities—though we try. These are crimes we commit against each other, crimes we allow because we are too concerned with our own safety and status quo to be bothered. But You are bothered. I know that with our present-day, developed-world mentality, we tend to ask questions like, “How could a loving God judge our world? How could a loving God hold us to account when we cannot see Him?” But even if God did not hold us guilty for how we have forgotten and disrespected HIM, we would stand condemned for how we have disrespected and abused and ignored His image that is seen so clearly in the children of the world. In fact, some moments, when I read about atrocities done to children and defenseless women and oppressed people groups, I think, “How do you hold back, God? How do you keep from not just wiping us completely off the face of the earth?” Even with the Western, rights-focused bent that I must fight for the rest of my life, I am more amazed by His mercy in those moments than offended by His judgment.

Yet He has not wiped out. He has given grace. He continues to love His Western, privileged church even when we fail miserably at being His hands and feet to the oppressed. He allows me to approach Him daily, hourly with my comparatively small frustrations and complaints.

I am amazed by this God. I am humbled by this God.

And I pray that these two attitudes—amazement and humility—will lead my heart and my hands and my feet into becoming more and more like His.

Chester and the Galaxies

/ jdunderwood / 4 Comments

The tree that dropped these leaves was so beautiful I had to stop the car to take pictures of it. Then I noticed the carpet of leaves on the sidewalk.

About an hour ago I took a break from the article I was writing and went to the kitchen to get a cup of coffee. Scurrying across the linoleum was a bug. Thinking it was a box elder beetle (Jake did a recent science project on these; they’re funny looking bugs), I got down for a closer look. It was a tiny cricket, smaller than Chester in Cricket in Time’s Square (I read this as a kid and then again to my kids last year–great book) but delicate, just as Chester looks in those beautiful drawings by Garth Williams (who also illustrated Charlotte’s Web and Stuart Little).

I pushed a crumb on the floor closer to the cricket, but it jumped. Up, up, up, a good six times higher than its own height, then landing on its feet. Amazing! I did it again. Then I just watched, as the cricket put out its incredibly thin, sensitive feelers to test before it took each step. Somehow its long, folded jumping legs moved in stride with its much shorter front legs, and a few seconds later, it had made its way under the stove and was out of sight. Smart cricket! I don’t remember the last time I swept under there!

“Chester” made me think of a conversation I had on Wednesday with one of the international students I tutor. “What do you want to work on today?” I asked her at the beginning of the session.

Her reply was immediate: “Bible.”

“Hard stuff again?” This would not be the first time we’ve discussed a Bible lesson. She is newer to the English language than many of the other international students in the class, so the discussions move too quickly for her, and on top of that she has no background in Christianity or the Bible.

“I don’t understand what we are talking about, and I have a test tomorrow.”

What they have been talking about is internal and external evidences, the canon, and plenary-verbal inspiration. Many of our non-Christian students WANT this. With educations steeped in the scientific, they want to sift through evidence; they want “proof” outside of experience.

But this student, though raised in the same kind of setting, is asking different questions. “How do YOU know?” she asked me a few weeks back. “What was a time God showed He was real to YOU?”

I’ve shared Patrick’s story; I’ve talked about moving to Japan and moving back. I’ve talked about comfort even in times that started out difficult and stayed difficult.

So this day I skipped the canon and started with general revelation.

And I got a little excited.

“When I took a walk yesterday,” I told her, “I noticed all the colors in the trees. Beautiful. And then I noticed these little plants—someone told me they are called ‘Chinese Lanterns.’ They’re amazing. And when I think that each winter these plants and trees cease operations, huddle into themselves during the cold months, and then are brought to life again in the spring, I am in awe!”

She was nodding, so I went on. I talked about the wonders of the human foot, that so small a base (and only two of them) could hold up a person as tall as the head of our international student program. She grinned.

“When I look at all of that, I think, ‘There must be a designer. This could not have come about by accident, by an explosion.” She’s shaking her head now, though I know she has learned nothing but evolution in her schooling. “I think that this must have come out of the mind of a Being far greater than I, Someone who was able to think of each tiny, tiny detail—down to the atoms and molecules—as well as the hugeness of planets and galaxies and how it all works together.”

I was breathless by now, and her eyes were shining. But I’m not finishing this post by saying that she made a decision that afternoon, though we moved from general revelation to special, from the stars to the Bright and Morning Star who came down for us to view him up close and personal and then died so we could really know Him (not that I used those words! J). No, this very special student is on her own journey, and I want the Holy Spirit of God to move her heart in that personal, beautiful way He has until it is her own decision and not one unduly influenced by me or anyone else.

But I finish this post with amazement at the general revelation He has given—from “Chester” currently hiding out under my stove to the galaxies and planets revealed to our weak eyes through the Hubble and Kepler telescopes. I finish with a sorrow-mixed awe at the power of storms like Sandy and what they tell us about our own incapacity and the mighty strength of the God who created wind patterns and waves that groan and heave with the weight of the Fall.

Take a walk today. Crouch low and notice the details. Look up high and watch the wind bend branches and trees as thick as our bodies. Google images of stars and planets (here’s a Web site I found today: http://www.spacetelescope.org/images/archive/top100/).

Get a bigger picture.

And let’s be amazed, awed, wowed together.

Here are some of those Chinese Lanterns–now I finally know what the red version in my yard is. They’re beautiful.