Giving up listening for Lent?! A Note From Jan.

Flew home from California on Tuesday night. Looks like I landed on the set of some science fiction movie. Good to be home but… adjusting to radical changes in landscape and temperature…. inching my way through labyrinths of snow. Still good to be back among hearty, bundled up folks, determined to survive ’til spring.   Time with family in California was good. But all that nice weather’s abnormal in February and grows a different kind of folk. To oversimplify, they like kale and exercise.

Last Sunday I went to church with the family. The minister spoke about The Transfiguration…Jesus up on a mountain with Peter, James, John and a couple of surprise guests. “While he was still speaking (Peter), a bright cloud enveloped them, and a voice from the cloud said, ‘This is my Son…Listen to him!’”

The minister, Chris, talked about his adventures as a mountain climber (I told you they like to exercise!). He said that, for him, the greatest danger was in descending. “You can get too casual, comfortable; as you head down, you stop listening. You are not the same person who climbed to the top; the experience changes you.”

Not too hard for you or me to extrapolate some lessons from this text and sermon. I sometimes needed Jud’s hand on my knee to quiet me…so I could listen. Hope God doesn’t need to “envelop me in a bright cloud” and speak out loud now that Jud’s not here.

Maggie and Kate spent 3 nights with me this week.  Hard to listen to anything but them when they’re around. We’d missed each other. Driving in the car with these two grands always proves informative, entertaining or both. After awhile, while driving to a friend’s house on Thursday, Maggie began to sing, to my surprise, “Pie Jesu.” She started learning it after Jud’s memorial service. Kate, not to be outdone, interrupted Maggie’s and my holy moment with, “Jingle bells, Batman Smells, Robin laid an egg!”

That’s an ongoing challenge…balancing life’s extremes. The balance between the mountain top, where you might just hear an angel sing or Jesus speak, and the valley with all its jingling bells, smells and rotten eggs. I take comfort in the truth that Jesus doesn’t just meet me on the heights but descends to the deepest pit in the valley with me, even when sometimes it seems like the only thing I’ve given up for Lent is listening.