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Lessons From a Three Year Old

Aug 15th, 2009 by Jim Hunter

With apologies to Robert Fulghum, who learned a lot of cool stuff in kindergarten; here are three life lessons I got from my three year old grand daughter last week.

Lesson Number One: Skin color is just skin color.
Sarah has been friends with Karma, a classmate at daycare, for several months. They play everyday, go to the same birthday parties and call each other best friends. Sarah talks about Karma a lot. Her parents know when Karma has been good or put in time out. They know what she wears and what kind of food she likes. The other day, several months into this friendship, Sarah asked her father, “Have you ever noticed that Karma has very brown skin?”

Lesson Number Two: If you have enough, why would you want more?
When Sarah comes to our cabin we spend a lot of time watching three DVD’s. We watch “Happy Feet,” “Charlotte’s Web,” (Also known as “Charlotte the Web”) and we try very hard to a DVD with Ariel, the little mermaid in it but it keeps getting stuck and we never see much of it beyond the coming attractions. After watching each of these around seven-hundred thirty-four times, Kathryn said, “Sarah, we need to get some more movies up here don’t we?” Sarah replied, “Nope, I like these three.”

Lesson Number Three: Why would you want it if you know it’s not yours?
Sarah is puzzled by everyone’s habit of locking the car doors when they go in the grocery store. She pointed out to her mother that “You just have to unlock them when you come back.” Her mom tried to explain that we lock the doors to keep other people from getting in the car and taking it or stuff out of it. Sarah doesn’t get it. “Well, they will see that it isn’t their car and get out and go to their car won’t they?”

Makes me wonder what you think about if you aren’t filing people into categories, worrying about how to get more, and making sure no one takes your stuff away. Would we then be flirting with “blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God?”

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His Mysterious Ways

Jul 26th, 2009 by Jim Hunter

I will tell you what I experienced, you can call it what you will. I will accept questions or proposed explanations but my feeling on the matter is; it was what it was, is what it is, will be what it will be.

I was driving east on I-26 on July 25, just past the I-95 exit in my 2000 Toyota. I was by myself and going around seventy-five miles an hour. I throw in that fact to let you know that it is highly unlikely that someone could stick their arm in the car and mess with the radio without me noticing.

It was around 5:30 or 6:00 in the afternoon and I had been traveling, counting a visit at my daughter’s in Spartanburg, since 10 that morning. I was feeling a little drowsy and considered calling Kathryn to clear my head. Instead, I started searching through the radio stations, settling on a NPR program talking about what happens to metal when you put it in the microwave. I found this show on 88.1 but moved up the dial to 89.3, where I got the same program on a station that I knew I would keep longer.

At first, the fellow was talking about putting a Klondike bar in the microwave while it’s still in the wrapper. Then, he started talking about how one can make “lightening in the microwave.” I heard him say it would be like the old Frankenstein movies as I put my head back on the headrest. I don’t think my eyes were open and I remember thinking that when he referred to the Frankenstein movies he was talking about how the monster was afraid of fire and the people would chase him through the woods with torches. Of course, I now realize he was talking about electricity jumping from one rod to another during a storm. But, I was kind of picturing torches in the woods, near a pond, in the dark, like one of the old movies with Boris Karloff that I used to watch on lazy Saturday mornings when I was a boy.

Suddenly, the radio switched to a song about God knowing the distance between the east and the west and the volume was a good bit higher. It was like the alarm radio going off. It startled me wide awake and I realized that I was either very close to dozing or was one short step from a long, perhaps very long, nap.

In the moments it took me to gather myself, I started wondering about the change from microwaves to a contemporary Christian song. I looked at the dial and it showed 89.7, the Christian station run by Columbia International University in Columbia.

Here’s my word on it. I had not changed the station and I did not turn up the volume. I was running around in the woods with Frankenstein and then I woke up.

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Customer Service

Jul 9th, 2009 by Jim Hunter

“What up with that Modern Affirmation?”

“Yeah, we don’t like it.”
“You don’t like it?”
“No, we don’t get it.”
“Don’t get it?”
“No! Let’s not do that any more.”

I don’t know what you did during the service when Kathryn exhorted us to “offer to one another signs of reconciliation and love,” but that is how the acolytes and I passed the time, I mean the peace.

Seems my young friends are somewhat attached to the Apostle’s Creed and wanted to make sure I knew that. So attached in fact, they sought me out afterward to make sure I got it. “Remember, no more Modern Affirmation.” Got it.

Well, got it sort of. We are actually using it again this Sunday. So much for customer service.

But all that does raise a question, or two, or three. Where’s the line between complaining and constructive criticism? Between, I don’t want to grow, and That creed sure means a lot to me? Between, our church serves the best spiritual ice cream in town, and sometimes you really need to eat your spiritual spinach? When do we move from being the customer, a consumer, and start being loyal to the United Methodist Church and upholding it with our prayers, presence, gifts, service and witness?

I know we live in time when folks can be, and are, a lot of places on Sunday morning besides the Hibben sanctuary. We want them with us so our hope is to be the most welcoming, friendliest, most inviting, inspiring, joyful, meaningful, loving place one can find, and our prayer is for that to all come together on Sunday morning. But still, are we really trying to be a church version of Wal-Mart? “Welcome to Hibben!” “Did you find everything you were looking for?” “Please fill out our customer survey within forty-eight hours and you can take ten dollars off the next offering.” “Thank you for shopping, I mean worshiping, at Hibben.”

Of course that is all an exaggeration and being friendly, welcoming and helpful are good things. It’s just that our being friendly, welcoming and helpful is centered in God’s love, not our desire to make a sale.

Is that where we are getting confused? Are we so used to being the customer that we think that whether or not Suzie smiled at us, what the temperature was, whether the choir wore their robes or not or which affirmation of faith we used, is really what it is all about. Are we forgetting that we are called to be a part of a great mission to love as we have been loved and to call others to join us on this walk of discipleship?

Just wondering.

But I do have one last question for my young friends who are done with the Modern Affirmation. Do you really get more out of sitteth at the right hand and thence coming to judge the quick and the dead? I kind of like “this faith should manifest itself in the service of love.”

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