gratitude

Gifts to Each Other

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My Column for The Elgin Review July 29, 2020

We were in the same work-group, side by side on our knees pulling weeds from a flower bed in front of Child Saving Institute in Omaha during a regional church meeting years ago. I was living in Lincoln and chose the Child Saving Institute project because I was adopted through the agency as a baby. My ties to the place were deeper than the roots of the weeds we were pulling. He was from one of the Omaha churches. As we worked in the hot sun, we got acquainted. He was gregarious and funny. He wore kindness like cologne and had a smile that lit his face, spontaneously lifting my spirit.

In the way conversations have of traveling from one subject to another, as we moved from weeding to mulching our conversation came around to my youngest son’s Asperger’s Syndrome. Ben was in middle school then. Middle school was better for Ben than grade school, but there were still challenges. I was concerned about the possibilities for Ben’s adult life. I don’t remember the details of our mulching conversation. What I remember is Merlin listened with kindness and then joyfully told me he had Asperger’s Syndrome, too.

Earlier, with glee, Merlin told me his love story about meeting and marrying Tami.  He told me about his Ph.D. and his work. Here, in the flower beds in front of the agency that had been my first home, the orphanage where I was gifted with my family, was an embodiment of hope that my youngest son might one day live a rich and full adult life—might marry, could have a meaningful career, could be a beloved, contributing member of his community.  Merlin was the first adult “Aspie” I ever met. Generously, he offered to talk with me any time. He was eager to meet Benjamin, and promised me to be of whatever help Ben might need mapping out his future.

Merlin was a gift to me from God. Merlin and Tami moved away from Omaha years before Mike and I moved back to the city so my friendship with him has been mostly through Facebook. If you’re a parent, you know the deep appreciation I feel for this man who took keen interest in my son. When Ben graduated from High School, Merlin was one of his cheerleaders from afar. When Ben graduated from college, I didn’t have to see Merlin’s smile to feel him beaming from hundreds of miles away.

Last week, Merlin posted a picture of himself beaming from inside what looked like a clear plastic robot head. He was in the hospital in California where he worked as a speech therapist in a nursing home. The funny looking contraption on his head was an Italian invention being used to keep Merlin off a ventilator. He had COVID-19. Merlin joked about the sounds his robot head made. They sounded like flatulence and it made him laugh. I laughed when I read his post.

Yesterday afternoon I received word Merlin died. The Italian flatulent robot-head apparently was no match for this dread-disease. I’m not laughing today.

Until now, other than John Prine, whom I’ve heard live in concert, those who’ve died from COVID-19 have been far-away strangers to me. I’ve been fortunate and thankful it hasn’t been as bad as I feared it might be.

Ben’s brother, my middle son, is awaiting the results of the COVID test he took last week. He’s been under the weather for days in Pittsburgh, PA where he lives. This morning COVID-19 is not far away, it’s close to home even though we don’t have many cases here in Antelope County. Will you pray with me for a vaccine, for effective treatment, for Dan and all who await test results, for those who are ill right now, for Tami and all those who’ve lost someone they love?

Thank you for doing everything in your power to be safe and to keep each other safe. We are God’s gift to each other. Just like Merlin was to me.

**

Park Church is going back indoors for August as long as Antelope County doesn’t have a spike in COVID-19 cases this week. You are welcome to join us for worship 10 miles west of Elgin on HWY 70 and ½ mile south or via Zoom at 9:15 every Sunday morning. I am always interested in hearing from you. Beckyzmcneil@gmail.com.

 

Snow Angels and other prayers

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They shuffle in, the first two with hair disheveled and bad dye-jobs, locks matted from too much time in their bunks. Faded florescent pink sweats hang baggy on their tattooed frames. Younger than my boys, I guess. Twenty-two, twenty-three perhaps. Another, older, rounder, with a short-auburn bob finds her place at the end of the table, quietly pulling out her chair. The fourth carries a thick red-leather, red-letter Bible in her willowy hands and wears her hair piled on top of her head. Her granny-glasses have lenses so thick her eyes precede her into the room, reminding me of a grasshopper–a very pregnant pink grasshopper. Her stomach swells taut against her sweatshirt, revealing her inside-out belly button below. She talks without stopping to breathe. At the end of this short parade comes a slim, tall woman with curly dark hair cropped like Peter Pan’s, slouching. There’s an energy of anger pulsing just beneath the surface of her skin. A thin blue vein beneath her eye twitches in time to her heart beat. Intelligent eyes silently claim, “I don’t belong here” as she curls, like a fetus onto the rolling chair.

The women of the county jail are a motley crew.

I carry with me, on my coat and in my hair, the crisp, fresh smell of snow.

“We have snow!” I say, with the delight of the first blanketing of a season, when the crisp, cold freshness is still novel and exciting, and driving on ice and through snirt (snow mixed with dirt) hasn’t yet grown wearisome and disgusting. “It’s so pretty out there.”

Without windows, the women were unaware of the hushed beauty pillowing the landscape on the other side of the cinder blocks surrounding them.

“I love snow!”

“I wish I could see it!”

“The men may get to go outside to shovel it.”

“I’d love to see it falling from the sky.”

“I’d make a snow angel if I could.”

Five of the six of us laugh.

It is my first visit to the jail to share Bible study with the women. I didn’t know they couldn’t see the snow.

Around an oval conference table in a nondescript interior room, they tell me their stories. Meth and Crack and a parole violation. Dealing in several counties, and jail time awaiting in each one.

Grasshopper starts talking. Five babies taken away, but this one, this one, she is determined, this one, her sixth, (is she even twenty-five?) this one will be born drug-free. She’s going to give this baby the life he deserves. She knows God is with her always has been always will be she just needs to trust in Jesus and get back to church and doing what the Gospels teach and not listen to the people who are always trying to lead her astray and she may have had the other kiddos taken from her because of drugs but not this one because this time she’s getting into the Word and following the Way and she’s not messing up again no way and if the baby daddy doesn’t want to support her and wants her to get messed up again she’ll just leave this time that’s all there is to it because she knows she’s God’s precious child and so is this baby and this time it’s all going to be alright so she’s actually happy to be in jail because it means less time to be tempted to backslide and turn her back on God which she isn’t going to do this time. No way.

Bonnie weeps. When she finds her voice she says she misses her fourteen-year-old boy. She feels so guilty. She really messed up and he’s the one who’s paying the price. “A boy needs his mother. Mine really loves me.” She says. “I really messed up this time” and again she weeps.

Five of the six of us weep.

Stoney silence from Peter Pan.

We feast on stories shared from our lives and from God’s good book. Grasshopper sings, “Jesus Loves me.”

Five of the six of us sing.

Our hour draws to a close. Teeth are starting to chatter and blue goose bumps have risen on the bare thighs of the bleached blonde girl wearing prison issue pink shorts instead of sweats.

I ask how we can pray for each other. “For my boy.” “For this baby” “For my boyfriend” “For me and my court date on Wednesday.”  I ask them to pray for me and my churches and for my six kids.

Peter Pan unfolds her long limbs and uncurls her lips and for the first time speaks very quietly saying, “Pray for my daughters, they’re 16 and 17 and live in Detroit where I am a social worker with a Master’s degree. Oxycontin got me here and I want out.”

Six of the six of us pray.

I step into the blinding brightness of sunlight bouncing off freshly fallen snow.

A holy dance of longing and liberty moving me.

Super Duper Deluxe

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My Column for the Elgin Review 11.20.19

We were in the furniture store on the square after buying our first home. The salesman was showing us the washers and dryers. Wanting to be sure we could wash the fluffy comforter for our bed we were deciding between the super-duper sized drum and the super-duper-deluxe when I started laughing. My husband and the salesman, not sure what I found so funny, looked confused. Stifling my giggles, I said, “six months ago we were washing our clothes on a rock in the Zaire river and now we’re being so serious about making the right decision between super-duper and super-duper deluxe. It’s crazy!”

Being in Zaire in my mid-twenties changed me forever. Things I grew up taking for granted, like washing machines and dryers, I no longer take for granted.

The past couple warm spells I spent hours washing the windows of the parsonage. The windows are as old as I am, and the storm windows were hard to figure out, but they’re very well made, and do their job and I’m thankful for them. In Zaire, we had crank out windows, missing their cranks and there were no hardware stores to go buy more so the only way to open or close them was from the outside.  Before Zaire, I took windows for granted. I don’t anymore.

We’ve invited Mike’s girls and my brother to join us for a pre-Thanksgiving/Mike’s birthday dinner next Tuesday at our apartment in Lincoln before we head to Minneapolis to celebrate Thanksgiving with two of our sons and my cousin’s family. Glenna, our youngest, laughed thinking about me cooking a Thanksgiving meal in our little-bitty kitchen in the apartment. I remember Zaire, where we had a little-bitty electric stove with dubious wiring and nothing else and I’m thankful for the apartment kitchen.

Other experiences have given me reason not to take things for granted. A hard marriage and difficult divorce make my marriage to Mike that much sweeter. A cancer diagnosis two years after we married, makes my clean bill of health now that much sweeter. And so on.

As we close in on Thanksgiving, it’s not things like appliances and windows and functioning kitchens for which I’m most thankful, but I am thankful for them.  I’m most thankful for all the people around me, for all the love and joy and laughter that are mine.

There’s an old hymn with which I have a love-hate relationship. The melody is singsongy and becomes an ear-worm playing on a continuous loop in my head after I’ve sung it. The words and sentiment are simple:

Count your blessings, name them one by one,

Count your blessings, see what God has done,

Count your Blessings, name them one by one,

Count your many blessings see what God has done.

(Johnson Oatman, 1897).

This Thanksgiving I’ll be counting appliances and windows and itty-bitty kitchens and a happy marriage and good health and family and friends and you, my new neighbors, among my many blessings. What and who will you not take for granted this season? What and who will you count as blessings this Thanksgiving?

You are always welcome to join us at Park Congregational United Church of Christ at 9:15 every Sunday morning to give God thanks for all the blessings of life. We’re 10 miles west of Elgin on HWY 70 and ½ mile south.

I love hearing from you. beckyzmcneil@gmail.com