Second Church Steps

Ordinary is my favorite kind of time.   The church year has festivals and really special occasions.   Then there are the days in between.   Once for a children’s moment, I asked two friends to help me.   They are REALLY good friends because they said, “yes,” then asked what they needed to do.   One dressed up like an angel.   The other dressed up like a rabbit.   It was late spring, and the children were not out of school yet, so we had a decent crowd for the children’s moment—that was about 5-10 at our small Missouri church.   I asked the children if they could guess my favorite time of year.   It wasn’t my birthday.   I gave them a hint—a diminutive angel walked down the side aisle very gracefully. No, it wasn’t Christmas.   Then a 6 foot + bunny hopped down the other aisle.   Yep, not kidding! No, it wasn’t time for the Easter Egg hunt.   They gave up. Do you?   Ordinary time is my favorite time of the church...

I am on the cusp of VBS, and my thoughts have turned to food.  Well, it is only natural since this year's Vacation Bible School  is about planting, gardening, seeds, and harvesting.    The Gravely Tractor and Wagon Have you heard of the “new” food approach called Farm to Table?  That is where the consumer/cook is mindful that the food on our plate is a product of the food grown on the farm.  When I was growing up, that was called, “Granddaddy’s Garden.”  My grandfather was an accountant, but in middle Tennessee that didn’t mean he couldn’t “hoe a row” in the backyard.  My grandfather’s garden was kind of “farm sized.”  It was a good acre or so and fed his household, his daughters’, and quite a few neighbors’ as well.  The string beans wound their way up the corn stalks, and there were some spots on those apples which would still burst with flavor.  Add into this mix that my grandfather had advanced glaucoma and could not s...

Be a FIG and DIG This is one of those days when you think you are doing one thing, and you end up doing another.  I thought I was going to be writing about “BALANCE,” you know—“to everything there is a season.”  Instead, I have spent the morning doing some study about fig trees in the Bible.  Yes,  I said “fig trees,” those things that cover Adam and Eve’s nakedness and signs of  the Hebrew People’s abundance and plenty during King Solomon’s time (Genesis 3:7 and 1 Kings 4:25).  The stories most often retold about “figs” in the Bible are the account of Jesus cursing the tree that does not bear fruit, and the parable of the gardener bartering one more year during which he will work diligently to make a fig tree produce fruit.  I looked at 44 instances of “figs” which are medicine, food, abundance, sweet, shade giving and a long lived symbol of peace,  and  I found the parable of summer.  How did I miss this figgy morsel?  It...