Word Power

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The Cub Scouts surrounded me in the Mount View Elementary School gym, dancing around in a circle from which I couldn’t escape. I was seven, or maybe six. They sing-song repeated again and again and again, “BigBu-uttBawlBa-byBec-ky! Bigbu-utt…” Mom was a den leader and my older brother was in the group. Mom must have been in a storeroom getting supplies or out in the hall or somewhere, just not right there right then. I remember how hot the tears felt on my face when I inevitably began crying-proving their taunts to be true in that regard. About the other, well, up until that day I’d never really noticed my sizable caboose. I was just a happy little kid, completely innocent of the scrutiny under which I, because I am a girl, would have to live my life.

The boy’s words were powerful. I don’t remember who any of the boys were. I don’t remember their faces. But, 50 years later (Fifty years later!) their words still sting.

In the first story of the Bible, God speaks and things happen. “In the beginning was the Word” is how John starts telling his version of the Gospel story.  Words count. They create worlds. Once spoken, they can’t be unspoken ever again.

One day, when my boys were young I heard mayhem and madness breaking out in the den. Flying into the room from around the corner where I had been folding laundry (all those cloth diapers!) I found three-and-a-half year-old Adam in the clutches of two year-old Daniel while baby Ben watched in stunned amazement from the safety of his bouncy seat. Dan had Adam by two fists-full of hair. He was banging him up against the sofa, ka-plow, ka-plow, ka-plow! Both boys were hollering like warriors from Braveheart. Plucking Adam up under my right arm, and Daniel under my left I carried them, legs dangling into the adjoining dining room and while plopping each on his own chair for time-out calmly I said, “Boys, in our family we don’t hurt each other. In our family, we love and protect each other.” I heard myself saying those words and at the exact same time in another region of my brain skepticism reigned, “Don’t hurt each other? Yeah, right!”

But you know what? Those words I spoke had power. I heard myself say them and I thought, “Yes! Yes! This is who we are, who we will be as a family. Even if we don’t always get it right, we will be, we are a family who loves and protects each other.”

Twenty-five years and a whole lot of family triumphs and tragedies later my three sons (cue the sit-com music) and I loved and protected each other through a whole lot of living.

I’m thinking about the power of words today as the nation’s Commander-in-Chief tweeted a taunt about “fire and fury.” I shudder to think how long the world may be shaped by the consequences of just three words. Twenty-five years? Fifty years? A century or more??

Words count. Words create worlds. Words shape reality.

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of each of our hearts be offerings of love by which the world is made, not worse, but ever better.

Cicadas and Home

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I wonder if Eve and Adam sat on a glider on summer evenings on their patio in the Garden of Eden and listened to cicadas droning their earnest August songs, thinking, feeling, “this is truly home.”

Yesterday was an unusually perfect day in Nebraska. August can be hot as blazes and humid as all get-out, but not yesterday, my day off. It was, in a word, “Ah!”

The sky was clear blue with fluffy little white clouds, there was a gentle breeze and the temperature topped out in the mid-70s. In the afternoon I found my way to our back patio with a glass of iced-tea, a bowl of round, ripe Bing cherries and a novel. We live in a townhouse with a walk out basement and a park-like common area just beyond our patio and our deck above it. From our glider, half secluded by a short fence and plantings from the sidewalk between our house and the neighbors to the west, I can hear the sounds of grandchildren playing with their grandparents in the community’s pool just up a short grassy rise beyond our back door.

Popping off the sidewalk and skip-hopping up the hill from behind me came a curly brown mop-haired, long-limbed, gangly boy, probably about seven years old, wielding a gnarly looking stick that was thick as his skinny arms and 2/3 as tall as he was. Behind him lumbered his dad, same hair (better kempt), same long limbs (less gangly). Dad carried one of those two-gallon plastic ice-cream buckets. “Off adventuring?” I asked. Dad turned, seeing me and laughed. “He’s hunting cicada skeletons.” He found one last week and now he’s searching on every tree and digging through all the lawn looking.” “Having any luck?” I asked. Dad chuckled and said, “We have two buckets full at home. What he’s going to do with them nobody knows!”

My oldest son is a music composer. When he was home in Nebraska one summer three or four years ago he recorded the cicadas and composed a piece incorporating their droning. Now he has a cicada inked on his forearm (or is it on his side and the snake is on his forearm?) no matter, cicadas make an impression on Midwesterners.

My husband Mike and I ate dinner up on our deck as the cicada symphony tuned up around us. The evening air vibrated and like sitting in one of those vibrating massage chairs, we breathed deeply and relaxed. Mike sighed and said, “Cicadas sound like home.”

I needed a day like yesterday. We all need those kind of slow days to breath in the goodness of God’s creation, to feast on the simple pleasures of iced-cold tea and round, ripe fruit, on little boys leading their daddy’s on cicada skeleton adventures and evenings serenaded with ancient symphonies by the cicada chorus. We all need to breathe and relax and allow God to recreate us, make us whole, and welcome us home.

“Tell me a story”

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Years ago during a difficult season of my life a friend would say, “Tell me a story.” Looking for true stories to tell lifted my eyes from my own sorrows and lifted my heart in the process. More recently, another friend said she looks forward to hearing about my everyday encounters, “divine appointments.” She called them.  Today, my personal sorrows are few, but the world’s sorrows have been weighing heavy on me. It’s been a tough year for tender-hearted people everywhere. As a kind of spiritual discipline I’m dusting off my old laptop keys and brushing up my storytelling, for myself, and for anyone else in need of a good story. Some of the stories I’ll tell are from my past, some from what’s happening around me right now. My goal is to write a story every day for the next year. Maybe I will, maybe I won’t. That too, will make a good story.