Sounds of Hope

It’s been a very odd weekend.   That’s nothing new in the life of Joyce.   Oddity and unusualness are the adjectives most used to describe my life.   My thoughts are jumbled as I write this… it will be interesting even to me to see where I end up.   Friday night my husband and I watched a movie on Netflix,  Shades of Ray .   The movie made us laugh.   It is always good to laugh.    Saturday morning brought omelets, plain and spicy followed by the weekly ritual of going to the dump with our trash.   We are now true country folk.   We have a huge pickup for this task.   It’s high, so high that I can barely get my rump on the seat.   I refuse to get a step stool and look like an old person though.   Next stop, a county fair… If you read Storehouses of Snow , you know that fairs and I don’t usually get along.   However, this was ONE fair… not a series of dirty dusty 4-H Achievement Days in deserted locations. ...

I walked to the pay phone in the hallway.   Everything was green, the walls, the floor, a dull green to match the mood.   I picked up the phone and dropped my coin.   I dialed the familiar number of the church.   My call interrupted the merriment of an Afterglow, a time of fellowship after a Sunday evening service.   Pastor Calloway soon said “hello.”   I said, “my father is dead.”   He said, “I’ll be right there.” We stood in the hall.   I don’t remember for sure who was there.   I know I was there.   I think my husband was there, but then he might have been with our son.   I think my brother was there, perhaps his wife or one of his boys.   Marta, the nurse my mother loved was probably there.   We waited as the body was disconnected from the tubes and wires.   A day before a young doctor knelt by his urine bag begging for it to fill with yellow liquid.   That liquid was like gold.   It meant my dad would ...

I haven't had a church home in a long time now.  When I left Tennessee for the long sojourn to the Storehouse of Snow of South Dakota, I was pastoring a small church.  I loved that experience.  However, looking back at it, I always feel sad.  I will never know but it seemed we were on the verge of growth.  I loved that small congregation with everything within me.  I saw God moving and touching lives.  Just before I moved to South Dakota we seemed to all disperse.  It was the great diaspora from The Well. I've not belonged anywhere since then.  I made some attempts at fellowshipping with other believers while I was in South Dakota.  Like the geography, everything was cold and distant.  There were no warm smiles or greetings at any church I attended.  It probably wasn't personal.  The coldness of the people was so pervasive that I think it seemed as normal to them as the sub-zero weather. I knew that all excuses and re...

Now that we've had some fun with women's hair rituals and devoted a whole blog to Spoolies , I want to get serious.  The headlines are very disturbing.   Afghan riots over Quran-burning: 2 days, 20 dead .    The article goes on to tell that 80 were also injured.  That's 100 people who've been hurt or killed because of Dr. Terry Jones.   I wrote a blog about "Dr." Terry Jones last September . I was hopeful after he backed down.  I hoped that the damaged could be minimized.  But he put the Qur'an on trial and found it guilty.  I am not sure guilty of what.  I also wonder what authority he feels he has to make such a decision and maniacal behavior. We often hear that freedom isn't free.  Now people are paying the price for Dr. Jones freedom.  The damage has been done.  The damage is irreparable.  Like a game of "telephone" where one person tells another and by the time it gets to the end of the line, it no longer res...