November 9, 2024 · 10:57 am

Threshold Moments

Standing in the passageway with nervous expectation.
Determining the direction of steps not yet taken.
Whether to move forward toward an unrehearsed future,
or to retreat back to a familiar bastion of complacency.

Such are the questions of liminal spaces, which provide
puzzlement and entanglement to both fact and faces.

Weighing adventure against the safety of known routine.
It’s something like a morning shave or the exhilaration of stepping out.
The surprise is not to be here again, but that it took so long between.

Visits to this terrain being by nature repetitive;
part of chronology’s push beyond the screen.
Three steps forward, two steps back.
Advancing and retreating – such a common dance.

The music begins, will you?

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August 11, 2024 · 5:49 pm

What I Have Learned in 40 Years of Marriage

Today my wife and I have been married for 40 years!  That seems like a long time, yet it also seems that it was just last week we said, “I do”. 

Coming up to this milestone I’ve been thinking about those years, filled with so many experiences, people and places, and what I’ve learned in that time.  What I’ve learned about marriage? About my spouse? About myself? About life?

So, here’s a list of 40 thoughts that in some way partly encapsulate my learnings:

  1. People are more important than projects.  The most important person in my life is my spouse. That hasn’t changed despite children, grandchildren, friends, etc.
  2. It is not good for man (especially this man) to be alone.  I learned this one the hard way. No job is worth separation – even if the separation is planned or supposed to be temporary.
  3. Family matters way more than career and other superfluous goals.
  4. Ministry is much easier when one’s life partner also feels called.
  5. Sometimes silence speaks more than words.  This can be true both positively and negatively.
  6. That “do not let the sun go down on your anger” scripture? (Eph. 4:26) Good advice.
  7. Being married to “the queen of small talk” is a gift when one is an introvert.
  8. Teachers need about a two-week adjustment period when school is out for summer or starting back up in the fall.  Just stay out of the way, be helpful, and be understanding.
  9. Some of the things that seemed important and worrisome, can age into funny memories.
  10. As long as you share common core values, its ok to have other interests, habits and hobbies.
  11. Be flexible.
  12. Learning to say “I’m sorry” or “I was wrong” early in a relationship will avoid a lot of grief along the way.
  13. There is no greater sorrow than your child’s sorrow, no greater joy than your child’s joy.  Having a spouse with whom to share this is a blessing.
  14. Change should be expected in any relationship, especially a long tenured marriage.
  15. Being married to your best friend is always having someone in your corner.
  16. Big decisions are best made after sleeping on it.
  17. When you say “yes” to a job, you should give that job your best effort.  There’s no excuse for not working hard.
  18. When you work at something you love, it hardly seems like work.  Marriage is work, but it needn’t be toilsome.
  19. Marriage is like a book – lot’s of chapters, some more interesting than others, but each essential to the story.
  20. Communication is to a marriage what water is to a fish.
  21. It truly doesn’t help to worry about tomorrow, each day does have enough trouble of it’s own.  (Matthew 6:34)
  22. If it makes your spouse feel better to watch the breaking weather report ad nauseum, put in your headphones or go to the other room.
  23. If it makes your spouse feel better to read all the latest Boilermaker news – you’ve got a pretty great spouse!
  24. When in public your teacher spouse is identified, stopped and talked to; just realize how many lives she’s helped shape and form and be thankful!
  25. Tell your wife “I’ll be in the car” before you leave to go to the car.
  26. Don’t wait until after you turn on the water to brush your teeth before you share something important.
  27. Understand this: Cleaning is to Lori what lawn and garden work is to Dan – a happy place!
  28. Moses had Aaron; Dan had Lori.  Neither one would’ve made it in ministry without their person.
  29. A farmer once told me as we welcomed our first child: “Dan, with every child you’re going to drop another rung down the ladder.” Three kids and soon to be five grandkids later, I’m just thankful she keeps me on the ladder
  30. Cereal can be good for supper, not just breakfast.
  31. Life is better when you travel in pairs.  (Genesis 2:24; Genesis 7; Luke 10:1)
  32. In hindsight, God’s got this!
  33. Being married to someone who can close down any public building because there’s someone to talk to, you get used to it.  Builds patience.
  34. Always make friends with the custodian.  These are important people who work hard and deserve respect. 
  35. The sun will come out tomorrow.  Might be behind the clouds, or only seen in a “sun break”, but it’s out there somewhere.
  36. The “love language” thing?  It’s valid. We don’t all give or receive love in the same way.  It’s worth learning your spouses love language.
  37. In the end “it’s just money”.  Generosity wears better than an attitude of scarcity.
  38. You can never imagine where and what a lifetime together will reveal, be thankful you get to explore it a day at a time.
  39. On their 40th Anniversary I asked my father-in-law when he and my mother-in-law had been most happy.  He said, in his dry wit, five minutes here, five minutes there.  But you know?  Those five minutes add up – be happy!
  40. “For better or worse, richer or poorer, in sickness and in health” is a vow to be lived into and to stick with.  Easier said than done?  Not really.  Not when you love the one who’s meeting you part-way.

Happy Anniversary!

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July 17, 2024 · 9:54 am

Come Sail Away

I imagine those who once sailed these waters off the coast of southeast Alaska, as I watch and photograph a cruise ship sailing ahead of our own into the distance and space of an evening horizon.

These were the lands and waters of the Tlingit (pronounced Klin-git) people long before they were home to Celebrity, Princess, Royal Caribbean, or Holland America lines. Other indigenous groups that called these waters, fjords, islands and sounds home included the Haida, Tsimshian and Eyak. Equally skilled with paddle and bow, they hunted and fished these places where now tourists by the thousands pull out cell phones and cameras to capture something native.

Could the native peoples, first nations as known in Canada, have imagined such huge floating vessels equipped with galleys, staterooms, casinos, bars and fine dining spaces? Could they conceive of the extravagance docking on shores of their homelands, passengers spilling forth to explore, shop, and go on excursions into the wild? Could they have fathomed the pallets of groceries even one such floating buffet might consume? The expanse in time and culture from these extremely different eras seems vast. Yet, here in common space these very different times and people collide. Alaska – the great land – has a history of human diversity that just keeps on diversifying.

In preparation for our cruise and my own exposure to Alaska I did some reading. James Michener’s Alaska was one volume, along with John McPhee’s “Coming into the Country”. Robert Service’s collected poems was a late edition recommended by a friend. I also revisited Jack London’s “White Fang” and “The Call of the Wild” for good measure. The cumulative appreciation of such reading was the many cultures and peoples who had once called the land home. From the historic travelers of Asia’s land bridge, to the Aleutians, Athabaskans and Eskimos, this great land has known settlers of many stripes. The Russians, British and Americans would all lay some claim to this frontier. Evidence is seen in the settlements yet today. Names like Sitka, Ketchikan, and Juneau bespeak the influence of people from outside.

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July 2, 2024 · 9:47 am

The Inside Passage

I have heard of the Inside Passage for much of my life. It’s a route specific to Alaskan and Canadian waters on the west coast of those principalities.

Here’s the Wikipedia definition: The Inside Passage is a coastal route for ships and boats along a network of passages which weave through the islands on the Pacific Northwest coast of the North American Fjordland.

But doesn’t the name “Inside Passage” sound like so much more? Think shortcut, protected route, even privileged or almost secret corridor. As in, “I found an inside passage that will deliver us to our destination!”

Seems like the stuff of hide and seek, or an episode of the Amazing Race. Titles can suggest such things. Couple a few words together and you open the imagination to new vistas and horizons.

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June 18, 2024 · 2:47 pm

Passageways: When Going Forward is Hard, but Going Back Would be Disastrous

When I was a kid our family often spent weekends camping at McCormick’s Creek State Park. The park has a variety of hiking trails and other attractions, but the one I was most drawn to was Wolf Cave. According to the park’s website “Wolf Cave was formed as underground water dissolved the limestone bedrock and carved out a network of passageways. Over the years Wolf Cave became exposed by the powerful forces of erosion. The cave is now dry because the underground stream it once carried has carved lower passageways.”

While I trust this explanation of the cave’s origin, as a kid all I knew was this was a “way cool” cave that you could actually go through from one side to the other. If memory serves, the opening of the cave – which is rather broad and squat – invites you to enter on bended knee. Through travelers are quickly funneled from the breadth of that opening into a single file channel of rocky outcrops and curves. The close formed ceiling of the cave causes you to watch your head (learned that the hard way), while the mud packed floor bids creeping footfalls that are sometimes accompanied by the suction of water. All of this is enhanced by total darkness, perhaps pierced by a flashlight if you were fortunate to have planned ahead.

I’m not sure my age when I first ventured through the cave, but I doubt I was yet ten years old. I do remember keeping touch with older siblings who were both ahead and behind me, and having the sensation of wanting to turn around more than once. That, however, was not an option for more than one reason. First, there were multiple people in line behind us and crawling back against that current of strangers was a foreboding thought. Second, the humiliation of turning back without completing the mission would have forever stained my reputation and self-esteem. (Who am I kidding, I wasn’t thinking in those terms. I just didn’t want to be called a “sissy” by my family!)

So, we pressed on. The confined passageway eventually yields to a more spacious great room at the cave’s opposite end. However, to exit that room back into the great outdoors one has to crawl through a small opening – which (as luck would have it) was filled with rain water on my pilot spelunking adventure.

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