Sound the Alarm!

Apparently, word spread that I wasn't in church yesterday.

"What did you tell people?" I asked my husband.  I was in bed, still in my pajamas, destined for the flu.   

"That you were tired, really stressed-out, and probably getting sick," he said.  Meanwhile, he collected the children to take them to an afternoon movie so I could sleep in a quiet house.

Then, my oldest approached me with her fist holding a crumpled up dollar bill.

"What's this?"  I asked her.

"It's my tooth fairy money from my piggy bank," she said, very seriously as she put it slowly beside me.  "I want you to have it in case you need to go to Starbucks later."  

I had husband love, daughter love, and then, and then, some completely unexpected neighbor love.

At 5:30, neighbors came over with dinner.  This amazing family brought me teriyaki pork tenderloin, fruit salad, green beans, rolls, potatoes, and ice cream for dessert.  I hadn't been in the hospital or anything.  I didn't even have a fever. They just heard I was tired and maybe getting sick.   

Then, this morning, another neighbor handed me a pack of those mocha frappuccino drinks to sustain me while working today.

"How did she know I love those?"  I asked my husband.

"It was either that or a bag of beef jerky.  You're sort of easy to please."  

It isn't like I'm on my death bed.  I was just really, really tired from a long semester.  I sounded the alarm on Sunday morning, and the family and neighbors mobilized immediately.  I know what happens when a mom takes a day off.  All of a sudden, the whole operation jams up.   There's a clog in the wheel; everything overflows.  She feels guilty and lazy because, after all, she's still breathing and can therefore empty the dishwasher. 

But I had to do it.   Living with flair means sounding the alarm if I have to. It means receiving from a community.  I want to be strong enough to stay in bed and strong enough to accept help.  And today, because I know what it feels like to be loved with a meal, coffee, and a quiet house, I know just what to do if I hear that somebody else is tired and stressed out.

My neighbors have flair.  Bringing unexpected dinner and iced mocha frappuccino drinks to a tired woman is a beautiful, and so appreciated, form of flair. Community flair--that's what helped me get out of bed today.

Why Professors Can Also Be Christians

It’s possible to be a scholar and a Christian.   It’s possible to study neuroscience, understand the process behind how we age fossils, know the mechanism of evolution, immerse yourself in various spiritual paths and still proclaim, with a resounding “yes,” that Jesus Christ is the one true God.  Many professors have deeply held spiritual beliefs.  Students, I find, have a hard time believing this.  Let me set the record straight. 

I believe the claims of Jesus because I don’t base my faith on my experience (I read too much neuroscience to be able to validate my perceptions of God as truth).  And although I feel, on a daily basis, what I describe as the peace and love of God in my life, answered prayer, protection, provision, and joy, I’m not a Christian because of emotion or experience.

I also acknowledge Jesus because I know you don’t need to discount science.  I’m married to an organic chemist, after all.  I honestly don’t understand, with 100 % certainty, the matrix behind creation or how species evolved (I wasn’t there).  The more I read, the more I observe, the more I see mystery and the limits of human understanding.   I’m not afraid of science; the deeper I delve, the more I’m amazed.    

When students ask me why I’m a Christian, I tell them it’s because of the historical Jesus.   As a college student, I read the entire New Testament because I had to be absolutely certain that Jesus made claims to divinity and that his body was resurrected as proof of his claim.  Why, I reasoned, would I stake my life and my reputation as a future scholar on some hogwash that wasn’t true?  I needed to come to terms with the claims of Jesus. 

What I found when I read the eye witness accounts of Jesus of Nazareth included miraculous demonstrations of power:  controlling weather, healing diseases, curing blindness and paralysis, knowing a person’s thoughts, multiplying resources like bread, wine, and fish, casting out demons, and predicting the future.  As I read, I wondered to myself why people worshipped this man.  And why did he cause such a political stir?  Other people, as the scriptures and historical documents report, did miraculous things.  Healers, psychics, and sorcerers had been around for a while (they made big money).  Other men, in other cultures, claimed to have the power of God.  They even performed miracles.  I’ve even read other cultures, in other times, have their own virgin birth narratives. 

But when I examine the resurrection of Jesus’s body, when I analyze the reports of who saw him, and when I read how I could know God, I had to listen.   I also had to listen to the hundreds of prophecies, written hundreds of years before the birth of Jesus, that talked about his life and death--and resurrection. 

The religious rhetoric imprisoning Christianity makes it nearly impossible to talk about it.  I don’t even know how to begin.  What I can say is that I acknowledged, in my mind, that Jesus was the incarnation of God.  Scripture talks about “receiving Jesus” into my life, so mentally, I asked the spirit of God to reside in me.  As someone who reads about the brain, I’m not sure where the Holy Spirit actually dwells in a person, but I know Jesus claimed that receiving the Holy Spirit meant you had a Counselor and a Comforter.  Jesus also claimed that by receiving him, I’d have eternal life that began now.  In other words, the spiritual death that accompanies our separation from a holy God wasn’t a future death.  It was the reality of my life before knowing God ("sin" is one way to describe it).  I had no “relationship” to God.  When I began praying to Jesus, I became alive spiritually. This meant that I began to enjoy worshipping God, praying to God, listening to the instructions and promises in the Bible, and most importantly, relishing the favor of God.  I also had power in my life to become the type of person God wanted me to be.   

I didn’t go to church today.  I was too tired (grading, a big wedding, everything else).  As I lay in my bed, I thanked God that my going to church doesn’t help me impress God.  I’m deeply loved, completely free, and completing confident that I am known by God.  I go to church to enjoy praising God with other folks.  I don’t do one thing to earn God’s love; I also can’t do anything to lose God’s love.

So, in case you wondered, that’s why I’m so happy and full of energy when I’m teaching.  That's one reason why I can live with flair.  God’s love is unfathomable; it sets people free.  My teaching philosophy has much to do with the love and acceptance I extend from knowing God.  

Now you can say you know a professor who is also a Christian.    

Living with flair means seeing the harmony between the life of the mind and the life of faith. 

Why You Should Sneak into the Kitchen During a Wedding Reception

During a wedding reception today, my youngest was fascinated by the food servers.  They'd disappear behind swinging doors and return with iced tea at exactly the same time you needed more.  After the cake cutting, several servers took the cake away on a little silver cart.

“Mommy, where are they taking it? When am I getting my piece of cake?”

As we waited, she became more and more agitated about the cake, her piece of it, and what in the world was happening behind those swinging doors to the kitchen. As a way to pass the time, I helped her try to imagine the secret world of reception hall kitchens.

“Can't we just go back there?” she asked. 

I asked one server if we could watch the cake being cut for the guests, and he reluctantly agreed.   We tip-toed  back, deep into the heart of the kitchen, lifting our dresses to keep them out of the way.

Seven sweaty servers, like nervous surgeons, stood around this delicate and elaborate cake. My daughter peeked around my back to view this inverted perspective of wedding receptions. Back here, in the heat and pressure of food service, the reception experience was being made for the rest of us by real people.  Tired people.  People who looked up at us, embarrassed, like we'd just caught them all skinny dipping.  

They apologized for not working faster. 

When we returned to our table, my daughter waited with her hands in her lap. She didn't say a word. The cake came in due time, and instead of just enjoying it, she appreciated it. 

Sometimes I need to remember to take myself and others back behind an experience—to see how it's being made for us. There's an infrastructure to our lives that other people make on their backs.  It's not just food service.  It's any service that we take for granted that makes our days happen.  Someone is picking up the garbage, sorting the recycling, delivering my mail, or keeping the street lights working.  Maybe I wouldn't demand so much if I could just journey back and see what's going on from a different perspective.

Living with flair means to sit with my hands in my lap and not demand my piece of cake.