Morning Thanks

Garrison Keillor once said we'd all be better off if we all started the day by giving thanks for just one thing. I'll try.

Tuesday, July 22, 2025


Tonight,  in the DAHM's annual Nights at the Museum program, the very heart and soul of the museum board doing her inimitable thing with old Sioux County, throwing some light on both the antagonism and and the unity of two towns just a few miles apart, vying for life and success in the last decades  of the 19th century. 

It'll be good!   

Sunday, July 20, 2025

Sunday Morning Meds from Psalm 57


 

Be exalted, O God, above the heavens; 

let your glory be over all the earth.”

 The basic paradigm by which I’ve always seen the Christian life is a series of ideas that rise from the Heidelberg Catechism, the handbook of doctrine with which I was raised.  Those steps are not difficult.  They go like this:  “sin, salvation, service.”

The story line begins with sin—our knowledge of it, as it exists specifically within us.  Calvin starts even a bit earlier, with the heavens, specifically with our sense of God as manifest in his world in what we see and experience.  Because humans can’t help but see God’s marvelous work in the heavens and earth all around, we there is something, someone, larger than life itself and much, much greater than we are—there simply has to be.

When we know we aren’t God, we know something about sin.

That conviction draws us closer to him. Knowing our limitations is a prerequisite to knowing God. Sin precedes salvation, or so the story goes, through the second chapter.

There’s one more step. That he loves us in spite of our sin makes hearts fill and souls rejoice; we can’t help but celebrate, and that celebration leads us into gratitude and service, into offering his love to the world he loves so greatly. 

Sin, salvation, service—that’s the story line, the narrative by which I was raised.

Mother Theresa’s take on a very similar tale is a three-step process not totally unlike Heidelberg’s narrative line, but colored instead by her experience in the sad ghettos of Calcutta.  Our redemption begins in repulsion—what we see offends us, prompts us to look away. But we can’t or shouldn’t or won’t; we have to look misery in its starving face, and when we do, we move from repulsion to compassion—away from rejection and toward loving acceptance. 

The final chapter is what she called “bewonderment,” sheer wonder and admiration.  Compassion leads us to bewonderment.

“Bewonderment” is one of those strange words no one uses but everyone understands, probably because, like reverence, it’s simply hard to come by in a culture where our supposed needs are never more than a price tag away.

Bewonderment is hard to come by for me, perhaps because it isn’t so clearly one of the chapters in the story I was told as a boy, the story which is still deeply embedded in my soul. “Service” is the end of the Christian life—or always has been—for me, not “bewonderment.” 

Maybe that’s why I’m envious of David’s praise here. What he says to God in prayer is something I rarely tell him.  I don’t think I’ve ever asked God not to hide his little light under a bushel, to display his radiant grace from pole-to-pole. I’m forever asking for favors, but only rarely am I adoring, in part, in part, I suppose, because I’m so rarely in awe. 

Bewonderment is something I’m learning as I age, and for that I’m thankful—for the book, for the song, for David the singer, and for the God David knew so intimately that he could speak the way he does in Psalm 57. 

It’s difficult for some of us to be intimate with God—to be so close to a being so great and grandly out of reach.  But intimacy is something a song can teach—and the heavens too.  Bewonderment is something even an old man can learn, if he has eyes and ears. 


Saturday, July 19, 2025

One Saturday near the Rock River

 

Went north, one Saturday morning in July, 2011, into the valleys of the Rock River, a tributary of the Big Sioux, whose valleys lack the depth and beauty of its bigger cousin's. Tougher area to get a shot that can take a viewer's breath away. But dawn is dawn, and the beauty isn't the river or the gravel roads or anything else. The beauty is in the dawn, here too.

What I came to understand fairly quickly into my journeys into early morning in the region was that the sky itself was hardly ever the whole story. Occasionally, the morning sun creates a sky full of abject beauty, enough to render  you unable to shoot pictures. There's just too much glory in the open world we live in.

But most often, what I had to learn was that a really good shot, like the one above, needs a character. The sky is a masterful setting here, but what makes the shot more memorable is the character of the story this moment on the Rock River creates, in this case, a half-gone elm (probably) reminding us somehow of our own tenuous hold on the reality of earth itself, our mortality.

So I shot and shot, in an attempt to let the space speak.


In this last, the tree up the gravel and the tiny little sign offer a little more to the story. 

Then I simply turned around to see what was behind me.

There's the Rock, and forever corn across it. It's catching, and I like it, but it's also, sadly enough, pretty much conventional Iowa--and therefore begets little more than a yawn.

Pointing the camera further south, I picked up an  unusual sight these days, cattle in an honest-to-goodness pasture (and not a confinement). Most foreigners in these parts might like to think this shot conventional, but it's rare, and that why I jumped on the shutter.

Honestly, this July morning you could take gravel roads all day long in this region and not see this--cattle in a pasture. It's a rarity.

And so, I went home. Not trophies, but blessed abundantly by simply having been out there. 

Wednesday, July 16, 2025

Remembrance


For years now, I've been contributing stories to KWIT, Sioux City, Iowa, 90.3,where Mark Munger produces them--edits them, adds sounds and music, then airs them, Monday mornings at 7:45, and then again at 4:45 in the afternoon. 

I don't know that I've ever slipped one into the blog, but this week's was so moving, even though I wrote it, that I can't help feeling that people who read my blog will enjoy listening. It's exactly six minutes long. It's produced just beautifully.

https://www.kwit.org/podcast/small-wonders/2025-07-14/i-will-never-forget-her-a-native-nurses-quiet-bond-with-a-wounded-soldier

Tuesday, July 15, 2025

And now we love them. . .


They were, not so many years ago, precious. Their country was at war, and they needed  help, needed a shield against the violence spreading across their country when Putin, who denied any such plans, determined he simply take over territory he deemed spiritually essential to reconstitute Mother Russia--or whatever. "No, I'm not going to invade Ukraine," he told everyone. And then he did.

That was about three years ago--February 24, 2022, to be exact.

So some of the refugees came here, even here to northwest Iowa, and, as immigrants have frequently done throughout history--and our own history, they took the jobs they could get here in America, despite their employment record or level of education back home. And now, the ones our church helped, appear to be doing well. 

But now they've been told they're not far from an seat on a jet taking them and a full house of others to wherever the wheels of the plane come down.

It seems, and it is, terribly, terribly wrong.

And it's not just here, of course. It's happening throughout this country because Donald E. Trump is doing exactly what he said he was going to do--he's reversing his predecessor's soft heart by enlisting his own, now huge, private army to grab immigrants wherever he wants and then flying them home--including Ukrainians. 

His fascist character has forever been on display, but somehow a majority of American believed him to be the only one who could carry the U. S. o A. out of strife. They voted the bigot in for a second term, and now he's doing exactly what he promised to do. A full 85% of my neighbors here in the county voted him in.

And now--wouldn't you know it?--the country doesn't think much of what he's up to. Here's the headline this morning: 

Gallup poll shows 79% of Americans favor immigrants, a significant increase from a year earlier and a high point in a nearly 25-year trend


All of a sudden, the fickle American public just love immigration. And it's perfectly understandable because at some level they know the immigrants around have become more and more essential to our way of life. They milk our cows, plaster our walls, paint our ceilings, clean our houses, build our highways, and do almost everything else good moms and dad don't bring up their children to do.

What's more, they absolutely hate the gestapo look and gestapo tactics of Trump's hooded police force. Americans don't like people being stopped on the street by hooded or masked guards. They don't like military vehicles rolling up to city parks, even though there's no one there. They don't like thugs. Except Trump.
Despite the fact that this was one of the issues that marked the presidential election and delivered the presidency to Donald Trump just eight months ago, support for immigration in the country has now reached record highs, even among Republicans. About 8-in-10 Americans, 79%, say immigration is “a good thing” for the country today, up sharply from 64% a year ago and a high point in a nearly 25-year trend. In contrast, only two in 10 U.S. adults say immigration is a bad thing, down from 32% last year.

Amazing. That's the good news this Monday morning. The bad news is that we're going to have Trump's masked crusaders around for another three years. 

 And he's talking about a third term too.  Ain't we got fun?

Monday, July 14, 2025

Happy birthday!

 

Happy birthday to the love of my life, a woman who has become the arms and legs of the family, my care-giver, the person who lugs out the trash and has spent most of her life for the last year trying to keep a house or two clean and her husband human.

I won't say how many, but this morning she's my age.

 


Sunday, July 13, 2025

Sunday Morning Meds---Psalm 57



“I am in the midst of lions; I lie among ravenous beasts—

men whose teeth are spears and arrows, 

whose tongues are sharp swords.”

 

Taking writing courses can be tough if you don’t have material. “What am I going to write about?” is often the most perplexing question students face—even college students—through an entire semester, which is why most teachers make assignments.  For years I sprung the same one on students on the first day of class:  in 500 words or so, go back to middle school and describe and define your “nemesis.”

 

It’s a winner because everybody has one. The moment I say the word nemesis, eyes light up. Somewhere through junior high, every one of us felt like killing the kid we thought of as the boss or the snob, the bully or the hot shot, maybe the teacher’s pet.  We’ve all had a nemesis.

 

Sometimes I’d give those essays to my colleagues in the Education Department, who used the stories in class to make sure future teachers remembered that school can be torture, and often is. It’s a wonder some of us ever make it out of middle school. Those essays could make a ton of young parents think seriously about home-schooling.  Only once in twenty years did a student confess to being the bugger herself. 

 

One story I’ll never forget.  Its rising action is universal—little girl gets on the bus every day, teeth chattering, scared to death of the bully, an overgrown fourth or fifth-grade girl who makes her life miserable. I don’t remember the facts, but they’re all alike—mental abuse, physical abuse, even sexual abuse. It’s not pretty. Think the worst.

 

But this story didn’t end there.  Years later, this student, a junior in college, goes to a beautician to get her hair done and gets assigned a woman she recognizes as the satanic figure on the neighborhood bus. Chills flash up and down her spine, but she takes the chair, and the two of them start to talk, laugh. Eons have passed, of course, and neither of them are who they were. And yet both of them are.

 

The hairdresser takes a snip or turns or curl or whatever hairdressers do, then, out of nowhere, says, “I’m really sorry for who I was way back then.”  

 

Blew my student away, she said, and that’s the story she wrote, one of the only ones I’ll never, ever forget. 

 

For the record, that’s an argument against home-schooling. 

 

I find it amazing that the attribute David first notes in his assessment of his fierce and overpowering enemy isn’t size or ferocity or tonnage. After all, Saul was a giant, an all-pro tight end, the kind of physical specimen just about anybody would want for a king.


We don’t know a great deal about David’s pecs and abs, but we know he was a mouse as a boy. But then, with buff Saul threatening one’s life, most of us would be bloody scared.

 

Just exactly what he meant by “their teeth being spears” isn’t exactly clear, at least to me; but the next simile is transparent. If their “tongues are sharp swords,” what he’s telling us is that his enemies cut him to shred with their words, which is itself imaginative language since no one actually bleeds when people say bad things about us. But it’s almost hard to say that, isn’t it?—“no one bleeds when people say bad things.”  We all do. Okay, not literally. But we all do.  Everybody had a nemesis. Some still do.


It’s not sticks and stones for David, it’s words.  And maybe he’s right:  the worst we can suffer is a shard of something hateful cutting through the tender fabric of our own very human heart.