Stormy Weather

It rained here last night. Finally. In our little corner of the Valley of the Sun, the radar was wrong, the weatherman stunned, and a thunderous storm went out of its way to make us feel important.

The morning before, it rained at my friend, Deborah’s house, twenty miles away from us.  She was on the phone with her sister on the east coast when the first drop splatted.

“I didn’t know what it was,” she told me later. 

Only in Arizona do we forget what rain sounds like.

Last night’s storm made sure we didn’t confuse it with fireworks or car engines. Usually when I realize moisture is landing  close by, I quickly run outside to breathe in its sweet, fleeting  fragrance, eyes straining to make out the evaporating evidence on the ground.  Why they didn’t name this Sonoran desert The Kalahari instead, I’ll never know.

But last night I had just settled in under the covers when lightning outlined the window in our bedroom and thunder bellowed its bass “hello.”  It was a surprise visit and I was delighted. Suddenly, a chaotic tap dance beat a rhythm on the glass as rain and hail competed for my attention. 

Gleeful as a child, I cozied down deeper in the bedding and let the summer symphony lull me to sleep. 

Rain is a gift to desert dwellers, and when it comes wrapped in the darkness of evening, my favorite place to enjoy it is from the private box seat of our master suite.

From rainfall to curtain call, the show is complete with its own applause, then tiptoes away as I softly slumber. Sweet relief. Sweet reprieve.

Sweet dreams.

Photo courtesy of samantha celera's photostream at http://www.flickr.com/photos/13408740@N00/2226758824

Pick Your Poison

I was making my lunch today—half a ham sandwich on wheat with a generous swipe of mayo—when the wet side of the bread suddenly upended and landed face down on the cardboard package that our deli ham came in.

Gross. I don’t know where that cardboard carton has been. So I threw the bread in the trash and started over. Better safe than sorry, I thought.

Ever since I first read that report about invisible germs on shopping cart handles, my quasi-hypochondriac imagination has focused on all the other places germs hide in plain sight, ready to do a kamikaze dive into my intestinal tract.

I’ve imagined the hands of indecisive shoppers who pick up chicken packages, put them down, and then backtrack to the produce section of the store where they sort through green onions before deciding they’ll buy tomatoes instead. It’s not just pesticides that are out to get us, I thought, it’s germy stranger hands, too.

I’ve contributed to this problem, though. I used to boil hot dogs in their plastic packages in a pot of water so they’d cook in their own undiluted juices. Then I’d cut open the package handled by mysterious grocery store workers with unknown hygiene habits, then dropped on the floor by clumsy customers and restocked by efficient clerks, and now boiled in my kitchen.  All those innocent hot dogs went floating in invisible germs before I ever took a big ol’ bite.

I don’t know how we survived.

So imagine my surprise when I saw this post on a friend’s face book page today—eating your boogers may introduce pathogens from your environment to your immune system and help it build defenses. http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2013/05/13/nose-picking.aspx

It left me so cybershocked, now I’m re-thinking my entire worldview. 

What if you don’t really need to wash your hands before dinner? What if the three-second rule is too conservative? Is a daily shower a waste of water? Should I dust the house like they did on The Munsters, spraying the furniture liberally with choking particles? Why, just this very week I paid someone to vacuum and mop and dust away all those healthy germs in my house!  What if that proves to be our death knoll?!

I’m starting to panic here.

I remember someone telling me once that we all need to eat a teaspoon of dirt a day. We were probably making mud pies at the time. But I’ve known for years that house rules are a lot different than camping rules. If silverware falls on the floor while I’m setting the table, for example, poof! Into the dishwasher it goes. But if a fork falls on the open ground in the woods, I blow it off even if it still has campfire beans on it and use it to finish my dinner. Nobody gives a second thought to dirt in the woods.

Now that I think of it, once my kiddos stopped playing in the dirt and started playing computer games instead, our immune systems nearly disintegrated. I tried to compensate by adopting a pet, but everyone knows kid germs are way more deadly than letting a dirty dog live in your house. And I’m fresh out of live-in kiddos.

All this makes me think I should have just eaten that contaminated sandwich today. Who knows what strain of bird flu I could have been protected from if I’d been better informed about store-bought microorganisms. And if we keep buying into Johnson & Johnson’s propaganda about eliminating germs, the next thing you know, we could be turning up daisies six feet under the very dirt that might have saved our lives.

That does it. I’m tossing the Purell and never washing the dog again. Hopefully that will be enough to undo the damage I’ve done by keeping a clean house.

Cuz no matter what that article said, I just don’t think I can eat my own boogers. Germs may be our only hope, but I’m scared to death of pathogens.

Cutie patootie photo courtesy of its*me*red's photostream at http://www.flickr.com/photos/26321678@N00/298302937

Flea Market Junkie

I don’t know how to say this.  I’m hooked on watching American Pickers.  Don’t you think that’s irrational? I could blame it on my current state of invalidism—well, that might be a pun, but I’ll have to think about it—but the truth is I know the show’s airtimes by heart.

I might need a Picker intervention.

Why do I get such a kick out of this show? It’s voyeuristic flea marketing from the comfort of my living room, that’s why. It probably satisfies some kind of virtual garage sale-ing need in me so I don’t have to get up at o-dark-thirty on a Saturday morning.

I love the stars of this show, Mike and Frank. They’re kind of like Abbott and Costello of the back roads of Iowa, their home base. They “free style” all across the country, searching out forgotten antiques and bantering like brothers.  They “make a living telling the history of America, one piece at a time.” 

Their enthusiasm would be contagious except I’m allergic to climbing into underground tunnels with crazy hermits to find a rusty toy for sale.  And you’ll never catch me bungling around cobweb-frosted barn attics, fending off brown recluses and deadly snakes just to pull out the rusty guts of some ancient third world motorcycle. 

My granddad was a garage sale junkie.  Every Saturday he went to the local flea market and bought anything there that was broken.  Then he brought it back home and stashed it in a metal storage shed in his backyard where he thought my grandmother would never notice.  She did. And she hated it.

One weekend while he was gone, she and I conspired to rid her life of his broken garbage. We spent the morning raiding his shed and donating a bunch of it to a nearby landfill.  He wasn’t happy but he recovered quickly. By the next week you’d have never known we trespassed at all.  It was like a tide of debris had his name on speed dial—we took it out in the evening and he brought it back by morning.

To this day I hate piles of junk.  That’s how I know I’d have never survived The Great Depression. I’d have given away all the rusty bailing wire and worn out bicycle tires right before we needed them to patch the hole in our roof. 

I don’t know if I have no imagination or if it’s just a lack of foresight, but I can tell you throwing things out is so therapeutic! It’s like tossing bad choices in the trash. Hate those shoes? Donate them to the church bazaar. Fed up with all that orange Tupperware? Off to Goodwill. You know your kids will never make a collage from that stack of expensive magazines you read one time, so go ahead—feed the recycler!

Ooh, I feel better just thinking about it. And you know what? With all these endorphins flowing, I think I’m cured of those Pickers.

Of course, I’m still stuck in a chair for a while longer. And now I have to find a new favorite show to pass the time.  Maybe there’s nothing wrong with re-runs of two likeable guys from Iowa after all. You’ve gotta admit—it’s better than getting hooked on Toddlers & Tiaras.

Rationalization. The opiate of invalids.




Photo courtesy of v i p e z's photostream at http://www.flickr.com/photos/69367147@N00/6590131433

Please Be Seated

I had surgery four weeks ago tomorrow.  Time sure flies when you’re recuperating in a chair. It’s just been one big ol’. . . routine. Every morning it’s the same thing—my darlin’ helps me out of bed (my arms around his neck, his arms around my back—I’m pretty sure it’ll be months before I’ll want to, I mean, before I can get up on my own) and then I park in the living room for the rest of the day.

I know sitting sounds easy, but it took a week after my operation to learn to do it on my own. And did we ever celebrate!  High Fives and Cheers and, well, that was about it before I got tired. Still, I can’t sit in just any chair. It’s gotta be something that won’t mold me in a painful ninety degree angle.

A few days after my newfound independence, the phone rang. I had been standing for a little too long, but I answered anyway. Dead air time after my “hello” made me start to hang up when I realized it was a recording from our insurance company. They’d heard I was in the hospital and wanted me to answer a few questions.

Well, what could I do? I figured I’d better play nice or they might not pay the bill. I leaned against the kitchen counter, hoping for a short survey.

“For this series of questions,” the female voice began, “state your satisfaction level from one to five.”

I really needed to sit down, but how do you put a recording on hold? Even though I was now a card-carrying sitter, I needed both hands to lower myself into the recliner, and only one hand was free. Flopping into a chair was out of the question—if I popped a stitch and started screaming, they wouldn’t know how to rate my response. 

I started to panic.

“Rob!” I yelled, right after I answered a terse “five” into the phone for the sixth time. Then I parked part of my tush on a kitchen barstool for three seconds. On the fourth, I stood up. Now both hands were occupied—one with the phone and the other pressed against the new pain in my left side.

“Yes,” I said through clenched teeth to the mechanized voice in my ear.  “Roby?!” I yelled again, knowing he was in the shower, but hoping he’d hear me, come to my rescue and . . . do what?  I didn’t know.  I was trapped in fatigue—wandering through the house, bent over and unable to sit anywhere, convinced I’d fall down before the robot I was listening to finally shut up and paid for my surgery.

I began to fast and pray. And cry a little.

Maybe the android woman heard the desperation in my voice. Asking the final question, her monotone script ended with this helpful information.

“24/7 nursing assistance is only one of the services we offer. If there is ever anything we can do for you, just call us.”

“I need help getting into a chair,” I muttered, slumped over and unable to write while she gave the number.

“Remember, our nurses are here to help you with anything, night or day,” she repeated.

Now she’s just messing with me, I thought, knowing there was a blog somewhere in this irony. She was still talking, though— was that robot ever long winded.

 “I NEED TO SIT DOWN,” I interrupted loudly, using small words and praying she’d come to life, like Pinocchio or Sleeping Beauty or Number 5.

“Don’t hesitate to call any time day or night. Our nurses are . . .”

“I need someone to help me SIT DOWN!!!”  I yelled as the benevolent call disconnected.

Suddenly Rob rounded the corner, his worried face lathered in shaving cream.

“Are you okay?” he asked me with concern. “What do you need, babe?”  I hung up the phone and eased myself into a chair.

“I need a chocolate martini,” I told him, surrounding myself with ice packs and pillows.

You know, if I thought 24/7 nursing assistance offered distillation therapy I’d have called them. But it was pointless. I knew what they’d say.

“You’re still recovering from surgery, Mrs. McLeod. The only alcohol you can have right now is isopropyl.”

Talk about adding insult to injury.

Photo courtesy of Nathan Wells' photostream at http://www.flickr.com/photos/72274813@N00/867698433

Southern Comfort Food

I used to think hunters were cool. They’re so manly and outdoorsy and adventurous.

Then one day my dad shot some venison and made me eat a piece of deer tongue between two slices of Wonder bread. Ever since then, I’ve been on a modified hunger strike—I only eat meat I don’t recognize. It’s one thing to call venison food.  But it’s another thing to chew a deer tongue.

It’s just plain disturbing to eat something that can taste you back.

Don’t misunderstand.  I support the NRA—but I object to eating wild meat. That’s why I’m a strict poultrytarian. I’m convinced it’ll never be cool to hunt wild chickens—because nobody eats chicken tongue sandwiches.

But if someone did, it would be my husband.

I can’t explain how I managed to fall in love with a hunter. This guy has my dad beat. Rob grew up in the wild woods of Florida where dinner over a campfire required only a can of sardines and a raw onion.  On a very good camping trip, a hapless armadillo might run across his path and go to meet his Maker at the hands of a ballpeen hammer. Ballpeen.  You have to say it that way, too.

Yum yum. Armadillo sandwiches.  They don’t even taste like chicken.

Rob has eaten more inedible things than that guy on Bizarre Foods. Talk about an oxymoron - those two words just shouldn’t go together. On the other hand, if someone wanted me to sample some delicacy known as Bazaar food, I’d be salivating at the very thought. No animals are ever injured in the making of hot, buttery cinnamon rolls.

When I met my husband, he was mastering the unnecessary art of cooking rattlesnake pizzas. Not from a can. From a snake hole in the middle of the desert. I was practically a widow before I became a bride.  Being a native Floridian, he can’t pass a booth selling Gator On A Stick without supporting the local economy. And once when he was on-duty at a Florida fire station, he encountered a rattlesnake that was eating a squirrel. Dinner that evening was an epicurean fantasy—Breaded Squirrel-Stuffed Rattlesnake. Now you know why he’s never critical of my cooking.

With standards that low, I can’t lose.

He has his limits, though, and draws the line at certain kinds of roadkill. He’ll only eat it “if it’s still warm—and not from the sun.”   

#quotesIwishIdneverheard#

You’re probably wondering why I fell in love with this wild Florida Cracker.  Well, he’s romantic.  On his first hunt with my dad, the only wild game they brought back from the woods were five unfortunate squirrels. But judging from the love note he scribbled for me while he was supposed to be scouting venison, I think Rob was just too head over heels to shoot straight.

That little treasure—which I still have, tucked away in my jewelry box—read, in part, “We didn’t see any deer, dear.”  I’m telling you, it made me swoon. But that was nothing compared to the souvenir he dropped into my hand along with that note.

He gave me a dead squirrel foot. And then he told me he loved me. I confess, I’d sorta been hoping for a diamond ring. But since the squirrel didn’t need that hind leg anymore, I kissed my man and thanked him for the sentiment.

Listen, you’ve gotta count your blessings where you find ‘em. At least it wasn’t a squirrel tongue sandwich.

Photo courtesy of stevebkennedy's photostream at http://www.flickr.com/photos/15444618@N03/3066412905

Walk The Wire

It’s been one year.  

A whole year since we sat mesmerized in his room, watching on television as his neighbor did the unthinkable and walked a two-inch cable across Niagara Falls.  The Wallendas are a circus family and live in Sarasota, Florida, where Rob grew up and his family still lives.

Everyone in Sarasota knows who the Wallendas are.

What I didn’t know until that night is that the Wallendas are followers of Jesus Christ. Nik Wallenda was interviewed just before he took his first step on that journey 150 feet in the air above the thick mist, roaring water and swirling wind of the largest waterfall in North America.

What do you do to prepare yourself for something like this, the reporter wanted to know. Meditate, practice mind control, center yourself?

“No,” Nik replied, “you know, I’m the righteousness of God in Jesus Christ. I focus on reaching the other side.”

Captivated by his dependency on Jesus to see him safely across, we heard him say a lot during that 45 minute walk, “Thank you, Jesus. You are mighty. I praise you, Jesus.”

I’m not surprised by that kind of reliance. Jesus is mighty and is more than able to keep a man stable on a dangerous wire. No, what really caught my attention were the things the media were saying as they watched his incredible feat.

“He’s so alone out there,” one said. “He’s keeping his eyes on the prize,” said another. And finally, just as the swirling mist enveloped Nik and concealed him from our view, I heard this profound statement broadcast across the air.

“He’s anxious to run into the arms of his family who wait for him on the other side.”

The comparison was not lost on me, sitting next to the bed of my dying father-in-law. With every step Nik took away from the family who wished him well on the American side of the Falls, our view of him grew smaller while he came closer to triumph at the end. It was so much like the fading moments that pulled our dad from us.

And I wept. I wept for our temporary loss which cloaked Dad’s final joy, kept from our view by the swirling mist of our blinding grief.

Then last night Nik did it again. This time he walked the wire in my home state, Arizona, fifteen hundred feet above the floor of the Grand Canyon. And this year it was me who fought a battle with cancer. It was an opportunity for fear.

If I’ve learned anything in these fifty-five years of my life, it is this—fear never misses an opportunity.

But in the crazy desert wind high above the Colorado River Gorge, Nik Wallenda put one foot in front of the other on a slippery cable, voiced his confidence in his Savior, and let faith overrule the temptation to panic. As the cables swayed beneath his feet and competed in his vision with the goal on the horizon, Nik told his father it was an optical illusion—not fun, he said—but  kept walking.

“Thank you Jesus, for this beautiful view,” we heard him say. “Lord, help this cable calm down. God, you’re so good.  Lord, help me to relax, Father. You are my king. Oh, Lord, peace.”

He walked the wire, one foot in front of the other, all the way to victory.

Rob’s father walked the wire, too, right into the arms of Jesus. And I walked the wire this year in a different place with a different outcome. Last week we learned I am cancer free.

We each walk the wire in our lives. More than once and in dangerous places. Despite an audience of many, we walk it on our own. But I know the One Who can be depended on to keep my feet steady and my heart calm even if fear distorts the horizon with optical illusions.

Some called it a daredevil stunt. But I think it's the best picture of peace in our dangerous journey through life as there could possibly be. Whether I balance above the blinding mist of a roaring waterfall or in the hot, dry winds of a desert gorge, Jesus is the One Who has my back, Who holds me up, and Who carries me safely to the other side.

“I will never leave you,” He said.  “I will not, I will not, I will not relax My hold on you, nor let you down.”

Thank you, Jesus. You are mighty.

Photo courtesy of hokkey's photostream @  http://www.flickr.com/photos/hokkey/314849610/sizes/m/in/photostream/

Key Lime Pie

Some people call me The Pie Lady. Not because pies are my favorite dessert— that would be chocolate cake with white buttercream icing, please—but because they’re my husband’s favorite dessert. Actually, his Granny’s guava cobbler might be his first choice, but she didn’t pass the recipe down so now he likes pies.

What is guava cobbler anyway?

I was just a kid when we got married—eighteen and head over heels. Two weeks after our Arizona wedding, Rob “drug me off to the Florida swamps”, as he likes to describe it, and once I realized there were no mountains on the Gulf Coast, homesickness set in like an Everglades fog.

So I started baking.

Since Rob isn’t fond of chocolate or cake, I learned to make pies.  Here’s what I discovered about them—they’re forgiving. Even if the crust is inedible, at least it did its job of protecting the filling, and you can always spoon that hot stuff over vanilla ice cream. Just try that with a ruined cake sometime. Cakes are persnickety.

My mother-in-law doesn’t enjoy cooking, but she still has some stellar recipes up her sleeve and pulls them out if I whine nicely or her boys are around. Finally one day, after I mastered the art of a homemade pie crust, she shared her recipe for Key Lime Pie and we made one together.

Oh.My.Goodness.

It was years before I realized it was a version of the recipe concocted in the Florida Keys about 150 years ago. But this one should have taken top billing from the get-go. JoAnn’s pie elevates key limes so they become the pale green star of the show, held up by a supporting cast of whipped cream and egg whites.

Chiffon Key Lime Pie—it’s only the nectar of the gods.

So I squirreled away that priceless formula—which, by the way, never turns out as well as JoAnn’s because the main ingredient is patience and I’m a bit short on that—and it became my very own Favorite Pie.

Skip ahead fifteen years. This time it was me who dragged my husband and our kids away from the Florida swamps, back to the desert and the mountains I missed. And one afternoon I delivered five of my best pies to a local lunch café which was in search of a pie baker.

As the owner stood at the counter sampling my wares, a friend of hers—a pastry aficionado (in her mind)—pointed at the green chiffon masterpiece JoAnn would have been proud of and decreed,

“That’s not a Key Lime Pie.”

Now correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m pretty sure that’s how the War Between The States got started. And it was about to get all stoked up again.

“It most certainly is,” I told her. “My mother-in-law has lived in Florida her whole life and she gave me this recipe which she makes with key limes from a tree in her very own yard so that  makes it a real Key Lime Pie,” I ended smugly.

Guess I told you, I wanted to add. But having lived in Florida for ten years, I’m a bit Southern myself now, so I just smiled politely. Right after I determined she was definitely a Yankee.

In the end I was hired but my Key Lime Pie was not. I couldn’t understand it. What was this pretender pie that robbed my heirloom recipe of stardom? Didn’t the café owner realize she could have been famous? And more importantly, do all Arizonans take advice from Northerners?

I went on a mission to prove that JoAnn’s recipe was indeed the genuine article, the real McCoy, and the rightful owner of the name Key Lime Pie.

I found out I was wrong.

I hate it when that happens.

Turns out the original Key Lime Pie was a variation of a lemon icebox pie, and was invented by a cook down in the Florida Keys who was too lazy to find lemons one afternoon and substituted key limes. It’s a flat, tart cheesecake-ish kind of dessert and has none of the richness or class of my mother-in-law’s version.

It’s not even green.

So that little café eventually went out of business, never reaching its potential for fame. All because, I’m convinced, no one recognized the genius of fluffing up a Key Lime Pie filling and caressing it with gobs of whipped cream.

It’s understandable, though. I think they missed the memo about making lemonade when life hands you lemons. And if life hands you limes, find a better recipe than the one everyone else uses.

You can quote me on that. Southerners like me don’t mind.

Photo courtesy of Adam Fagen's photostream at http://www.flickr.com/photos/51035749109@N01/2267586185

Ding Dong

I’m not that good at being logical. 

A friend once told me that if you worry about what could happen and then it doesn’t happen, you worried for nothing. But even if it does happen, then you suffered twice.  I looked at her like she was speaking Cantonese.

It’s hard to reform a worrier.

All those ‘what ifs’ that fly around over my head like juggler’s plates—I’ve gotta keep ‘em spinning, you know, or they all come crashing . . . . DOWN!!

Somebody distracted me. Barely  a week after Nathan dropped by. Suddenly I was really down. Inconsolable again. And then . . .

Oh, you guessed it, didn’t you?

The doorbell rang. At night. In the heat. For the third time.

Did you know God often does things in three’s? To make a point? To prove that He’s the One with His finger on the doorbell?

Well, I wasn’t about to answer it. I didn’t look any better this night than the last time a stranger interrupted my tears.

So Rob did.

“If it’s another bug guy, ask him what his name is!” I shouted after him, still sobbing into my Kleenex.

Well, I may be afraid, but I still have instincts.

He was gone a long time. I could hear him talking with the man at the door, asking questions like he always does, playing cat and mouse with salesmen so they’ll think he just might buy whatever they’re selling. Finally, the guy at the door got tired of the game, and asked to come inside to use our bathroom.

Rob showed him the way, and then walked through the family room where I was mopping up mascara from off the sofa and whispered in my ear,

“It’s another bug guy and his name is Chase.”

Well—I may not have remembered who Caleb was, but I was pretty sure Chase is neither Hebrew nor Biblical.

Figures, I thought.  And I could have really used some Holy Raid tonight. The devil was bugging me big time.

A few minutes later Rob showed the guy to the door and came back to sit beside me on the couch. “Well,” he asked, “did you look it up?”

“There’s no Chase in the Bible!” I said in exasperation.

“How do you know?” he retorted.

“So, what should I google? Chase and the Bible?”

Oh me of little faith.

Chase shows up a lot in the Bible. That’s because ‘chase’ is a verb. Sometimes it’s a command. And the Bible is full of stories about people like me who were always being ‘chased’ by some scary somebody or other.

But this is the verse God chased me into reading:

“But you will chase your enemies and they will fall before you by the sword.”  Leviticus 26:7

Yes, indeed. By a tiny little sword in the hands of a surgeon with the last name CHASE who had removed the cancer in my uterus a few days earlier and told me yesterday that she got it all.

God kept telling me. Again and again He told me to take courage and expect Him to show up.

I’d like to tell you I’m a reformed worrier, but in all honesty I can’t. So instead, I’ll tell you this—God keeps His promises and goes out of His way to comfort the hearts of people like me.

I’d also like to thank the inventor of the doorbell. The house may disintegrate around me, but I will always make sure the doorbell works. And there will never be a "No Solicitors" sign on our door.  They're welcome here anytime.

Especially bug guys.

Wait and hope for and expect the Lord; be brave and of good courage and let your heart be stout and enduring. Yes, wait for and hope for and expect the Lord. Psalm 27:14

Photo courtesy of neosnaps' photostream at http://www.flickr.com/photos/29674401@N00/2574417351

Bug Busters

I started thinking there must be a huge neon-flashing cockroach on our roof.

A week after Caleb introduced himself through the screen door, Rob and I sat on the sofa eating dinner, watching TV and talking about my fear of an approaching hysterectomy as treatment for endometrial cancer.  

Now, I need to mention that I hadn’t had any significant surgery since I had my tonsils out when I was four. And, while it hardly made up for the killer sore throat I woke up with, I did remember that was some pretty good ice cream they gave me once I stopped crying.

Jump ahead fifty years. Big jump. So now, even though I managed to hang on to my reproductive system until they could remove it laparascopically and robotically—thus speeding up my recovery time—I hadn’t had knock-me-out surgery since that ice cream incident. Nor had I spent the night in a hospital since I delivered each of my two babies.

That was a happier reason for lingering than this visit would give me.

Appetite fading, I began to worry. And right on cue, the doorbell rang. This time Rob got up and opened the front door to a stranger who stood outside in the evening heat.  He’s so much more willing to listen to sales pitches than I am that his dinner got cold. I'd finished watching House Hunters by myself by the time he returned with a smirk on his face.

“It was another bug guy,” he told me, and handed me the calling card of tonight’s angel in disguise.

“Blue Sky Pest Control?” I read incredulously.  “Are you kidding?!”

Rob just grinned.

“Look at his name,” he told me.

Nathan. Nathan from Blue Sky Pest Control. God wasn’t even hiding with this one.

I remembered a little more about Nathan than I had about Caleb. Nathan was the prophet and BFF who confronted King David about his murderous/adulterous/just-plain-inappropriate relationship with Bathsheba. 

Wow. It’s a tough job to be friend to a king. Glad I’m just a peasant.

That didn’t seem like enough information, though, so I pulled out my laptop and googled Nathan. Nathan was God’s spokesman to David. He was his friend and counselor, and even saved his life once. His name means Gift of God, but he was best known for being fearless.

Fearless. That’s been the word of the week.

I can’t say that I’ll be best remembered for being fearless.

It’s kind of embarrassing to be a child of God who struggles with fear. For some reason I assume that because I belong to Jesus I’m not supposed to be afraid of anything or anyone. Just in case you’re believing the same lie, let me clear this all up for you. It doesn’t freak Jesus out when I’m afraid. The important thing is that He’s not afraid.

The day before Fearless Nathan showed up offering to squash more bugs in my life, I went through a ring of index cards full of scriptural promises God has been giving me since April’s round of doctor visits began.  I noted recurring words in all of them—eighty promises at that point—and the phrase repeated most often was don’t be afraid.

I heard one time—and checked it out just to make sure—that the instruction God repeats most often in the Bible has nothing to do with money or sex or the nasty nine or dirty dozen. The thing He tells us again and again is this: “Do not be afraid.”

Guess I’m not the only cowardly lion in the pack.

I wish I was more courageous. But if I was, would I depend on God less? Maybe. Who knows. Right now, the only thing I can say for sure is that when fear attacks, I know where to hide - safe in the arms of Jesus. The Guy Who isn’t afraid of cancer or doctors or the future. There isn’t a bug alive who can escape His big feet.

I needed eighty promises because that’s how fear-full I can be. And if I that's not enough, I know He’ll keep those promises coming. He doesn’t mind.

Look how he keeps sending bug guys to our door. 

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of sympathy, pity and mercy and the God Who is the Source of every comfort, consolation and encouragement.  2 Cor. 1:3

Bugged

“Please help me, God,” I wept.

And then I wondered if anyone has ever dehydrated after three hours of crying. I’ll have to google that sometime. I knew any number of people would want me to call them if they knew how low I felt, but how many of them could actually listen in tongues to a blubbering woman on a cell phone?

I knew God was my only hope. He’s bilingual.

Suddenly the doorbell rang.

Wonderful. My makeup had melted strategically into all the lifelines on my face, my eyes were strangely swollen and shrunken at the same time, and I wasn’t exactly dressed for company.

Maybe if I hold my breath they’ll go away, I thought.

The doorbell rang again. I squinted through the peep hole in the front door at a hot, tired man who wouldn’t take silence for an answer. I knew I could outlast him—I was on the lock side, after all. But what if my front lawn had blown up and he was just trying to check for survivors? I guessed I really did need to know if there was a gaping hole in my grass.

For some reason.

Knowing he couldn’t see through our security screen door at how terrible I looked, I finally spoke to the persistent ringer on the other side of the steel mesh divider. “My name is Caleb,” he began, and then tried to sell me exterminator service. But there was no way I was gonna sign on his dotted line—I’d have to open the door, and that wasn’t gonna happen.

His interruption worked, though. The tears had stopped, and as I locked the front door again, I returned to the living room and turned my attention back to Jesus.

“Really, God?” I accused. “I ask you for help and you send a bug guy?”

“Yeah,” He said to my soggy heart. “But what was his name?”

Caleb. Somebody important in the Bible was named Caleb, but that’s all my parched brain could come up with.

“Look it up,” God pushed. I can take a hint. A pushy hint. I sniffed a final sniff and did what He said.

So. Caleb. Did you know you can google anything and get answers almost as fast as a cry to heaven? Turns out Caleb was one of the two full-of-faith spies who believed God at the entrance to the Promised Land. Twelve men spent forty days on a recon mission, and when they returned six weeks later laden with grapes as large as their heads, Joshua and Caleb told the children of Israel, “We can do this! We can take this land and win this battle over our enemies!”

The other ten spies disagreed. Despite surviving forty days undetected by giant adversaries, they now stood shaking in their sandals at the prospect of posting foreclosure notices on the pagan squatters.

Sometimes you can’t see the forest for the trees.

Bad press is powerful. That whole mass of Hebrew humanity nearly rioted in the streets after hearing the pessimistic perspective of those ten scaredy cats. Suddenly their audience wished they’d never heard of Moses or God, preferring to have died in the desert—or even in Egypt—and tried to stage a deadly coup right on the spot.

But it was Caleb, whose name means whole hearted, who appealed to their senses.

“Then Caleb silenced the people before Moses and said, “We should go up and take possession of the land, for we can certainly do it. . . . And do not be afraid of the people of the land, because we will devour them. Their protection is gone, but the LORD is with us. Do not be afraid of them.” Numbers 13:30; 14:9

Do not be afraid.

It was eight days since I got the call no one ever wants to get. Forty-eight hours after my D&C, the doctor’s office called and asked me to come in right away. Twenty minutes later the compassionate woman told me they found cancer in my uterus. And once that sunk in for a few seconds, she followed up by saying, “But it’s the best kind of cancer to get.” Slow growing, very common, usually discovered early because it’s the only female cancer with symptoms. Highly survivable.

But all I heard was cancer.

And God. I heard God, Who said again and again and again to me as I plunged into the paradoxical depths of both fear and His Word, “Don’t be afraid. Don’t be afraid of the people of the land because they are bread to us—we will swallow them up. . . I Am the Lord Who says to you, Fear not, I will help you! Fear not, there is nothing to fear.”

And I stood at the entrance of the Promised Land trying to decide Who to believe—the scaredy cats who looked a lot like me, or the courageous voices who believed God, the One Who never lies.

I chose to believe God.

But I had to ask Him again, “Really, Jesus? A bug guy?”

“Well,” He responded with amusement in my spirit, “the devil was bugging you. And it was time to squash him.”

I love His perspective.

Extreme Sports

 For a couple of bucks and change, I know how to make two preschoolers deliriously happy—just buy craft kits from JoAnn’s. 

My daughter clued me in to this. Last week she spent two dollars and fourteen cents and bought herself some peace and quiet via her daughters’ craft table in the kitchen.

While Jules, the two-year-old, lavished exotic paint strokes on a little wooden birdhouse, Allie, the five-year-old, struggled to glue and stuff tiny tissue paper squares into a flat Styrofoam flower.

Before long, though, she decided six pieces of half inch tissue were enough embellishment for the piece, and found a better use for it.

Musical instrument.

If you poke a fat, plastic needle quickly in and out of Styrofoam, it makes a noise that Allie thinks sounds like talking worms.  I didn’t actually realize worms can talk. Thank goodness Allie was there to explain it to me.

“See, YaYa,” she said, “the worm pokes his head out and says ooh-eek, ooh-eek. Why don’t you try to catch him?” she finished.

Well, I tried, but I’m no early bird.  Allie was delighted, and melted into giggles.

“You have to catch him ten times,” she declared, “and then you win the game!”

Now it was a musical game.  So I tried twenty times and only caught the little bugger twice.  And even though Allie was loving the challenge, ten victories seemed pretty extreme. Finally she stopped giggling, took pity on me, and poked the plastic worm out far enough for me to grab it with fake fingernails.

“I won! I won!” I celebrated, fully in touch with my inner competitive child.

“Nope,” Allie responded, “now you have to catch him ten more times if you want to win.”

“What?!  You can’t change the rules after I win!” I countered to the little midget control freak.

She rolled her eyes, spoke distinctly, and used small words so I’d understand.

“But YaYa,” she explained, “this is the second level.”

And that’s how the generation gap was invented.  By a five-year-old who beat Angry Birds before I did. 

I’m never shopping at JoAnn’s again. It’s bad for my self esteem.

Cartoon-onomics

Allie asked me how they make cartoons talk.

Did you ever have one of those out of body experiences where you try to look at life through the eyes of a five year old? You weren’t very good at it?  Me neither. It was like . . . driving a big ol’ klunker bus down the highway doing sixty and suddenly throwing it in reverse.  Stripped gears, baby. And horrible engine sounds.  Pretty sure that’s what this conversation was like to my little granddaughter.

I gave it my best shot.

Quickly I scanned through the grown-up catalog in my brain of real life ways to explain a cartoon to a kid. It was a pretty outdated catalog, but I found what I thought was a genius idea.  Quickly, I ran into our office, grabbed a pencil and a half-used pad of post-it notes, and began drawing the worst-ever jumping stick-figure flip-book in the history of cartooning.  The heads got alternately larger and smaller on each page which made it look like they were inflating and deflating for no particular reason. And while the legs were in motion, they also grew remarkably longer and shorter throughout the tiny little epic—kind of like accordion action figures.

I didn’t know if Allie understood what I was trying to show her about cartoon cells done the old-fashioned way, but when I finished and enthusiastically flipped the home-made movie for her, she politely said,

“That’s good, YaYa.  But how do they talk?”

Oh, yeah. Talking. I decided to tap into her love of Disney’s movie, Tangled.

“See, Allie,” I began, “somebody drew better pictures than these and made, like, a video of them but there were thousands and thousands of these kinds of pages with Rapunzel on them, and while they played the movie one day, a woman stood at a microphone and they recorded her voice saying all the things you hear in the movie and when they put it all together, the pictures and the recorded voices, they had Tangled. 

“So it’s a made up story that looks real, but actually it’s somebody’s voice along with pictures drawn by an artist.  See?”  I concluded.

Allie looked very serious. At first she said nothing as what I’d told her sunk in. And then she sternly corrected my feeble explanation.

“But, YaYa, Rapunzel is real.  I saw her at Disneyland.  She’s real.”

And that’s when the blood all drained to my feet and they took away my grandma card.

Hmm.  Guess I drove that bus into a lake.

At least she still believes in the tooth fairy.