Reflections by Doc Arnett

The memories of my youth are mostly of working on the farm: rising early for morning milking, feeding the cows and calves, working in the crops, etc. Saturdays and Sundays were no different from any other day in regard to the duties of the milk barn; we still had to climb out of bed and report for duty without regard to adolescent inclinations.

All of those years of getting up before dawn could have formed in me an indelible habit of rising early. Instead, I have an abiding sense of deep appreciation for the delightful luxury of sleeping late.

My memories of my children’s early years are mostly of working as well. I purchased for them the privilege of having a stay-at-home mom by working three jobs. I graded papers and made lesson plans after they had gone to bed. But we lived in a decent neighborhood and the vehicles we drove were only a few years older than those of our friends. Okay, the truck was several years older but it was still a good truck.

Then, there was the divorce and a second marriage. Now, I share nine children and fifteen grandchildren scattered from South Dakota to Texas to Kentucky to Virginia to North Carolina. And an abiding sense of deep appreciation for phone calls and visits.

There are dozens of other lessons learned and habits developed. Among those is a growing lack of interest in wasting my time on bitterness and paybacks. A love of carpentry and cabinet making. An appreciation for foundations that hold up over the years. An absolute admiration for people who’ve been hammered by life and yet remain gentle and forgiving, cheerful and humorous. I’ve learned to love churches that focus on worship and obedience and let the dead bury the dead in the other places.

I carry my share of scars and regrets. I’ve made my apologies and taken some small pride in a very few things I’ve done well. I’ve endured some trials and testings. I failed some of those and have been blessed beyond my imagination. I’ve sobbed in agony and laughed hysterically. I’ve lost friends and brothers and gained other precious relationships.

Sometimes, I think I’ve gotten less than I deserved. And, in most of those cases, I have to say to myself, “Thank God! Thank God for that mercy!”

If life was fair, I’d have been stoned to death a long time ago.

H. Arnett

4/27/11

In this quiet light

the morning comes

slow and calm

deep greens

bring a sheen of spring

covering the fields and hills and banks

I give thanks

for blade and blossom

the hope and comfort of fresh beginnings

budding branches

pry loose

the dying grip of winter

there is in the stubborn shoot

a determination

rooted in life

knowing that the cold

cannot keep back forever

that holy promise

of seeds and sowing

of growing and harvest

that even the least of earth

shall have their season

H. Arnett

4/26/11

I have wondered from time to time about the years in the life of the carpenter about which we have no information. We know quite a bit about his birth, except for the actual date, of course. And, we know that he traveled to Jerusalem when he was twelve years old, held his own in discussions with the rabbis and reprimanded his parents for not knowing where to look for him: “Didn’t you know that I would be in my Father’s house?”

Other than that, we are given very little in regard to those nearly twenty years between the temple and the beginning of his preaching and teaching ministry. We know by inference that he learned the trade of carpentry and reasonably conclude that he was probably taught that trade by Joseph. I suppose that he snagged the occasional splinter, dropped a timber or two, although I’m sure that the angels charged with his protection made sure that he never “dashed his foot against a stone.” For all I know, he may have never sustained even a cut or a scratch but I’d like to think that part of being human meant that he did have a pain or two along the way.

Certainly, in the events leading up to his death, he experienced fully the pains of humanity. As he prayed in the garden just before his arrest, he begged to be spared from the coming affliction. For no less than an hour, he pleaded, “If there is any other way, let this cup pass from me.” His emotional agony grew to the point that the capillaries around his sweat glands burst and he began to “sweat as it were drops of blood.”

And yet, his prayer was denied. And not only did that cup not pass from him, he drank its full measure.

His inquisitors ripped whiskers from his face, hit him with their fists, beat him with a stick, jammed thorns into his scalp, scourged skin and flesh from his body with a whip, drove nails into his feet and hands and raised him up to die from one of the most excruciating tortures ever devised by humans. The blood that began spilling from his body in the Garden of Gethsemane spattered the yard of the high priests, the courts of the Sanhedrin, Pilate and Herod and the streets of Jerusalem, finally poured out at the piercing of the spear on Golgotha.

Why such agony? Why such sacrifice? Why such terrible suffering? Why such endurance of torment and obedience?

Because there was no other way for a holy and just God to pay the price of sin and redeem those he loves from the sentence of death and hell.

No other way.

H. Arnett

4/21/11

On Saturday evening, I prepare for grilling. While the charcoal moves toward the white ash stage, Craig and Jay and I hide plastic eggs around the yard. A half-hour later, I start the hamburgers, hot dogs and cheddarwursts. In between flipping and shuffling patties from the edge to the center and from the center to the warming rack, I go over to shoot baskets with a couple of the grandkids. When the cooking is done, I call them over and we go in to eat.

Randa and Christy have been busy inside: slaw, pasta salad, and Italian beans are ready as well. Eleven of us sit around the table, sharing food and teasings. A nephew and his wife and son show up, too, but have already had supper.

Meal finished, we move outside, give the kids the proximity of the egg zone and turn them loose. Most of them find one or two right away; all of them run right past a couple of eggs lying in plain view. That is nothing new to the species; we often ignore the obvious in our quest for the obscure. With a bit of giving clues and coaching, they find all of the eggs that Craig and Jay and I can remember hiding. The other three or four will probably turn up some time or another.

Craig and Jay swap packages of candy for the eggs. The nephew and his family head for their home and Randa’s brother, Kevin, heads for his. Jay and I captain two teams of three for a game of touch football, giving in to the darkness less than an hour later.

I leave them all in the TV room and go upstairs to practice songs for Sunday’s service and review my sermon. I come back down in time to finish Crocodile Dundee II with the rest of the family. Except for Craig, whose snoring is low enough that we don’t miss much of the dialogue. He wakes up when the movie is over and he and Christy and the boys leave.

Tomorrow, Jay and his two children will head back to South Dakota and the house will seem strangely quiet and empty. But good memories will linger. There are few pleasures I’ve ever known that have outshone that of having grown children come home. And that’s true even before they have children of their own.

Just imagine how much our heavenly Father looks forward to having us all together.

H. Arnett

4/25/11

He complained that evening that he wasn’t feeling well, something about his back hurting, up high, between the shoulder blades. It didn’t seem like anything severe or serious and neither of them thought much about it. His usual routine was to spend most of the night on the computer and then go to bed about the time his wife was leaving for work in the morning. But that night, he turned in early.

She stayed downstairs, grading the pile of papers from her English classes. Later, one or two papers after she’d gone brain dead, she’d wearily climbed the stairs and readied herself for bed. She pulled back her corner of the covers quietly and eased into bed as gently as she could, hoping she wouldn’t disturb him. She slipped into sleep quickly and easily.

In the morning, he lay still and un-stirring and she slid out of bed as quietly as she had slid in the night before. She took her shower, fixed her hair and made ready for the start of another week. Another routine week of teaching class, grading papers and what little bit of social interaction there might be in the quiet life she lived. Then, just as she was about to leave, she went back into the bedroom to tell him she was going.

“Surely he is awake by now,” she thought, softly pushing the door open. But, no, he still hadn’t stirred, still lay there quietly. She noticed then, somehow, that he was too still, too quiet.

It occurred to her, in the after-shock, that she really had no idea how long he’d been lying there like that. In the dark, in the quiet, in her careful avoidance of doing anything to disturb him, she would not have known it if he had been dead already when she came to bed. Or, he might have had the heart attack while she was in the shower just thirty minutes earlier. She hated thinking he had died in that quiet aloneness, thinking that he could have passed away during the night. “How could he have died right there beside me and I had no idea that he was even in trouble?” she sobbed.

We cannot spend our lives in the constant worry of the thousand different things that could change without notice. We cannot go about our work in continual fear of all the things that could go wrong. But we should live keenly aware of every blessing, every precious friend, every sacred moment.

And ever ready to share the joys and trials of this fragile and capricious world.

H. Arnett

4/19/11

Boy howdy, did we sure have Kansas this past week: near ninety degrees last Sunday, thirty-mile-an-hour winds a few days, thunderstorms, rain, temperature dropping forty degrees in twenty-four hours and a chance of snow for the weekend. Saturday’s gray dawning came with a strong north wind and chilly temperatures.

This Lord’s Day morning, though, came bright and still. Not a leaf fluttered on the big elm tree when I looked out the kitchen window. Grape hyacinth blooms clustered below the birch trees and scattered toward the blooming crab apple. Green from the rains of last week, the grass filled in the frames of fence and driveway, spread beyond the ditches.

Inside the church, a similar spirit of refreshing seemed to spread through the congregation. In the time of prayer and singing, a warm peace and joy lifted their hearts. Songs of rejoicing and praise, a hymn of devotion, a stirring of the Spirit in both song and sermon. Prayer in which it were as if God spoke to us. And also, moments of quietness to allow the inner person time to contemplate, to be still and know that He is God.

There is a strengthening renewal in these times when God sends his good sunshine right into our souls. It is in the departure from our busy-ness and bustling, in the calm deliberateness of focus on things more lasting, and the lifting toward a higher plane, that we find the genuine Spring of Life.

And are, indeed, made new continually.

H. Arnett

4/18/11

Like a poor cousin

or a friend who can’t shut up

about a bitter divorce,

winter came early

and stayed late.

From November to May,

a month longer each way,

it came with its callused cold

and a long, lingering gray

that turned day into twilight

and night into a darkness

that you could feel.

We waited,

worked through the ashen shades

of beige and brown

and the pale shadows of summer

dead on the stems and blades.

We worked through

the brief teasings of spring—

those first tinges of green

along the banks and ditches

and buds swelling

with stubborn hope

at the ends of thin branches.

The wild plum

has come with its burst of white

against dark trunks

and the redbud has born

its boughs of lavender.

The Bradford pear

opposite the huge cottonwood

beside the driveway

yields its blooms

to the stirring wind:

all this earth’s good hope

bending toward Resurrection Day.

H. Arnett

4/15/11

The sun had just begun to burn through the fog while my colleague and I were walking back from the Navy Pier toward our hotel in Chicago on a chilly April day. As we walked south on North Columbus Street, I heard someone saying, "Now, you see those shoes? That man’s shoes need some help." It took me a little while to realize he was talking to me and about me. "Tell you what; you need to get some Kiwi leather conditioner, it’ll keep those shoes looking good and if they get wet it’ll keep the water from ruining the leather." I looked over at his buddy sitting on the metal railing that runs alongside the bridge over to Wacker Avenue. My intrepid math teacher friend stayed about ten feet away from any of us.

Still yakking, the street savvy hawker leaned over as if to point out something on the sidewalk and the next thing I knew, he’d squirted something onto my left shoe. I hadn’t even seen the bottle concealed in his hand. I didn’t know if it was Kiwi leather conditioner or a mixture of pigeon poo and dishsoap. It was becoming to dawn on me that I was getting hustled. He didn’t bat an eye or miss a beat. He kneeled down on the sidewalk and patted the top of his left knee.

“Put ‘er up here.”

His jeans were cankered with dirt from the soles of previous customers and I now had a blob of something on my shoe, so I obliged. He began popping his rag back and forth and rattling on, “This is how I pay my rent and put food on the table for my kids. I work.”

As he continued on about shoes and work ethic and all, I interrupted, “Where you from?” Only slightly rattled by the interest, he answered “I grew up in Jackson, Mississippi.”

“You ever get down to Biloxi?”

“Naw, man. I just grew up down there in Jackson, Mississippi. Never been to Biloxi.” Thinking that his family might have been able to slip in a drive from Jackson to Biloxi at some point during his formative years, his response stirred my suspicions ever so slightly.

In regard to my “What’s your name?” he replied that everybody called him “Baby Shoes” because “I’ve been doing shoes since I was a baby.”

I continued my amiable interrogation. By the time he finished the first shoe, I knew that he claimed to have six kids and that the oldest was twenty-seven. Just about the time he was ready to start on my right shoe, a couple of police officers rode up on bicycles. One of them immediately went to Rail Man and asked for his ID. Rail Man initially stated that he had none but the officer had no time for that. “Show me your ID,” he repeated in a tone of voice that made it seem like he was definitely not doing this for his own amusement. Rail Man obliged with a Social Security card.

Meanwhile, Baby Shoes said to the second officer, "How you doin’ today, Baby?" There was no response.

The shoeshine man tried again, "How are you today, officer?" "Fine," responded the lean, thirty-something black patrolman. "See there: use a different language, you get better results."

Baby Shoes quietly absorbed that and then began talking to me again, his voice not quite as smooth as before. Although he kept rattling on, his attention was clearly on the officers and his friend. In fact, he was so distracted that he let slip that none of his kids were still living at home, “They’re scattered all over the state.” Must be a lot of shipping costs involved in putting food on all those tables.

When he finished the second shoe, he stood up, turned away from the police officers and leaned close to me and said in a low but enthusiastic tone, “That’ll be eight dollars a shoe, sir, eight dollars. And a nice tip, too, please.”

Well, folks, I might have a Southern accent and I might be a little slow in the ways of the world, but if you’re going to extort me, you don’t want to do it in front of a pair of Chicago’s finest. I can be downright assertive when two armed men are standing ready to defend me from the grit and grime of urban grafters.

“No,” I replied warmly, “we didn’t agree on that before you started.” After deducting a few bucks for the misleading information about feeding the children and a bit more for never having visited Biloxi, I gave the man a ten and walked away. When Jeff and I looked back from the other side of the river, the cops were still there.

It was late that evening before it occurred to me that were it not for them, Baby Shoe’s cohort might have taken a much more active role in the proceedings when I disputed the amount due for services rendered. I wouldn’t have been the first stranger in Chicago to pay the price of his principles.

Indeed, it seems that the Lord does look after fools and children. I’ve proved it more times than I’d care to admit and mostly after I was allegedly grown up.

But I did have one fine looking pair of shoes for the next few days…

H. Arnett

4/14/11

I’ve seen pictures of “Stone Cold” Steven Austin fans holding up those signs at professional wrestling events and found them a bit irritating if not offensive. They seem to me to be at least irreverent if not downright blasphemous. By what could pass for coincidence, I had the chance to hear a little bit of the gospel of Austin while flipping through the channels the other day.

Apparently, “Stone Cold” now hosts one of the fourteen thousand new reality shows, this one based on a group of professional wrestling hopefuls, all vying to be the last one kicked of the Island of My Great Wonderful Chance to Be Someone Else. Austin and two or three other people who, I assume, are also professional wrestlers, were reviewing the contestants’ efforts and standings.

As they discussed one female contestant, the female professional commented, “I can’t believe she was cheating; she’s a military veteran. Of all the contestants, she should have known that she was cheating and that she’d get caught.”

“Cool,” I thought, “so, she got caught cheating and now she, the other contestants and whatever segment of the world population watches this show will know that she got caught cheating and got kicked off the show.”

Obviously, I don’t know a cotton-picking thing about the real world of professional wrestling.

Immediately, the other three professional wrestlers jumped to the cheater’s defense, with all sorts of good reasons for what she had done. Their views were summed up by the prophet’s own words: “If you ain’t cheating, then you ain’t trying.”

It is no wonder that my colleagues feel overwhelmed by the avalanche of plagiarism, no wonder that our financial aid office workers shake their heads at the number of students who enroll, show up just long enough to cash their Pell Grant checks for a few thousand dollars and then disappear. I do not marvel that chemically-enhanced superstar athletes break records, marriages and bank accounts or that actors who have made multiple millions of dollars end up facing tax evasion charges. Congress is not the Great Sewer of American Corruption; it is a reflection of the nation.

What I do marvel at is that there are still so many good people who defy the culture and live by a standard higher than the low ebb of Nielsen Ratings. I marvel and I thank God for them.

H. Arnett

4/13/11

We had a light freeze on Monday night, after the thunderstorm on Sunday night that brought lots of lightning and very little rain. We had high winds a couple of days and then a thoroughly pleasant Wednesday: temperatures in the solid sixties and a very slight breeze on a sunny day. A colleague and I stood out on the front lawn of our small office building, conversing and enjoying the chance to do so on such a fine day.

Yesterday, we had thunderstorms again, with a little bit of rain, maybe as much as a quarter of an inch at our place. Today, our forecast calls for mostly sunny with a slight wind and temperature back up into the sixties again. Tomorrow’s prediction brings us up to right at ninety degrees!

Then, we’ll slide back off that a little on Sunday and by Monday be back to seasonal conditions. All of this brings me back to my wretched little sense of humor with statistics and the myth of average.

Our “average” temperature for the week might be right in the mid-sixties but only two days out of the week had that temperature. To take a week of extremes like this and try to describe it by the average is so misleading as to be worse than useless. It reduces the week to the same as one when every day’s temperature was in the mid-sixties. But, of course, it’s easier to say “mid-sixties” than to say “we had a couple of days that felt like February, a couple of stormy March days, one that came straight out of July and a couple more that were, oh, sort of like spring in Kansas.”

Maybe the truth is that all of this up and down, sideways and back and forth is what spring in Kansas is like. Talking about “average temperature” might not be the best way to convey that. Too often, we reduce our lives to those same sorts of generalizations and fail to share the aspects that make true fellowship and connection possible. Someone asks how we are and we reply “fine” with nothing ventured and nothing gained. Only when we share joys and heartaches with one another are we able to move acquaintances into the realm of friendship and friendships into the realm of genuine fellowship.

It reminds me of the Cal Coolidge-like fellow whose week went something like this: On Monday, his mother passed away and a nephew graduated from college. On Tuesday, he had a cow struck by lightning. On Wednesday, two calves were born. On Thursday, a grandson was born. On Friday, his brother got paralyzed in a car crash on the way to the funeral and his son in Boston got a big promotion. On Saturday, he moved the cows over to another pasture and planted a garden. On Sunday, he was asked, “What kind of week did you have?”

He reflected for a moment and said, “Oh, about average, I guess.”

H. Arnett

4/8/11