McDonalds Monday

Good morning,

I hope this finds you doing well. I know it’s been a couple of weeks but I thought I needed a break from the Internet for a little while. I can tell I need to get away from it when I start to think about how I’m going to tweet or blog about every experience I have as soon as it happens. I’m not fully back though. We’re spending the week at Jennifer’s family farm near St Louis and they don’t have internet so I have to go to McDonalds to work. Don’t tell Jim Kreider, but the coffee here is pretty good. Merridee’s has better food though, except for the hash-brown pucks they still serve here.

Jennifer and I just got in last night from a weekend in Texas. Since 1985 the MS Society has been hosting a bike ride from Houson to Austin every spring and this year they asked us to take part. On Saturday the riders, about 13,000 of them, left Houston for the day-one 90-mile leg. They camped in the one-horse-town of La Grangne that night. Jennifer and I played a concert for them there . Then on Sunday they rode another 60 miles to Austin and collapsed. This is the first MS event I’ve been able to be a part of since my diagnosis in 2007 and it was a bit overwhelming. To think that the money being raised would go to help me and others like me brought about gratitude I didn’t expect. My friend Sarah, from Houston, who I’ve known since she was 11, rode especially for me and at the concert she presented me with the bandana she was wearing with my name on it. So cool, I was so honored.

I’ve got a lot of things to tell you but I can’t type them all right now. I hope you have a great couple of days! I’ll be in touch –

Peace and Rest

Jeromy

Merridee's Monday (2010.03.29)

I feel like a bit of a traitor this morning. I’m down the street from Merridee’s at Starbucks. Merridee’s doesn’t have oatmeal so I came down here but I didn’t end up ordering any. Jake, the manager here goes to church with us at Fellowship. He and his family are moving to Guam to serve orphans as soon as their house sells. They haven’t put it on the market yet but probably won’t need to. Just recently they met someone who wants to move to their exact area into a house exactly like theirs. They will probably sell to her and be able to forgo the whole realtor process. It’s just like God to drop something out of the sky like that.

Ok, I’m back at Merridee’s. I ended up ordering oatmeal from Starbucks and bringing it down here. There’s a girl studying calculus beside me. I tell her it looks hard and she agrees and explains that it’s college math she’s taking in high school. She says she wishes she wouldn’t have taken the course. She’d rather be hanging out with her friends. I don’t blame here. Staying “ahead of the game” is way overrated.

I just ran into Mark Stuart from Audio Adrenaline having coffee with Marty Magehee from 4Him. Mark’s foundation fully funds two orphanages in Haiti and he’s in the process of adopting two children from there as well. He and I met last year about the situation in Zimbabwe and haven’t gotten together since. Mark was in Haiti at the time of the earthquake and has been there for a total of three months since. One of the orphanages is intact, the other will need to be completely rebuilt but the kids are all safe. One teacher, who was home at the time, was killed. Mark’s involvement in Haiti, in something bigger than himself, bigger than his career, make’s me jealous. Stuff like that makes us live outside of ourselves and I want that again. It’s scary but there’s nothing better.

Rueben

In 2005 my friend Mike gave me a book called “A Guide To Prayer For All God’s People” written, in part, by Rueben Job. It has been my Bible companion ever since, through Africa, kids, MS, everything. Turns out that Rueben now lives here in Tennessee, fifteen minutes from my house, so this morning I went to visit him.

When I arrive, Rueben meets me at the door to his complex and leads me to the elevator and down the hall to he and Beverly’s third floor apartment. I walk into the room and the smell of cookies baking makes my shoulders relax. I realize right away that I am stepping out of normal Nashville-time and into something much more sacred. Rueben is welcoming and gentle just like I though he would be. His eighty-two year old heart is week so he talks slow and hushed, which seems to make the atmosphere even more Holy. My friend Mike is there too and he and I settle into recliners and Rueben and Beverly serve us cookies and coffee to dip them in. The space is warm and uncluttered and it reminds me of home. When I was a kid I spent most of my time with my grandparents, Amos and Leah, Maw Maw and Paw Paw as we call them. We lived in Lancaster Pennsylvania and like so many families there Amos and Leah grew up Amish. Just after they married and just before they had kids Maw Maw and Paw Paw left the Amish tradition and turned Mennonite. They left the Mennonite tradition shortly thereafter opting for hairstyles and chrome bumpers and movies. They stayed close to family though and I grew up visiting lots of Amish relatives with them. I loved those visits. Even without electricity and telephones, Amish lives are interesting. Conversations at Amish houses are long and involved, not just words in passing, and the jokes are sarcastic and perfectly timed. We usually made our visits during lunch and I would inevitably fall into a carb-induced coma on the sofa afterward. I loved falling asleep to the sound of my grandparents and aunts and uncles talking. It was so safe. That’s what this morning was like. I even mentioned before we left how I felt like I could sleep hoping that Rueben would say, “Stay and rest a while,” but he didn’t take the bait.

Last night our friends Missy and Anthony came over to talk about their upcoming wedding ceremony. Jennifer and I sort of feel like we had some hand in their getting together so we thought we should be in the wedding. Hutch and Sadie-Claire had to go to bed without much attention from us since we were visiting with our friends and I later told Jennifer how missing bedtime made me feel guilty. She told me not to worry and how she used to love falling asleep to the sound of the grown ups talking. Then I remembered that I loved it too. Then this morning happened and now I’m wondering what the Lord is up to. I’m meeting with Rueben again in two weeks to find out.

Tired Camel

Merridee’s is slow this morning. Must be the weather. After a week of spring warmth we’re back to clouds and cold, at least for a day or so. I reluctantly put the top back on my Jeep this morning but let the windows off in case the weatherman was wrong. I just had some coffee with an old friend that I go to church with. It’s hard to believe that I’m old enough to say “old friend”. Cameron, my brother-in-law, is with me this morning. He and Shantel, Jennifer’s sister, and their three kids are in town from St Louis to attend the birth of our newest nephew. Jannell, Jennifer’s other sister, the pregnant one, is scheduled for a c-section tomorrow afternoon (Tuesday). Cameron has brought his PC into an entirely MAC environment and has thrown off the entire ecosystem of Merridee’s. Fortunately there is another guy sitting between us and nobody can tell Cameron is with me. I offered to let him put an Apple sticker on his laptop this morning so he wouldn’t draw attention to himself but he refused.

This morning I read about rest in my prayer book. It was good and I was going to write to you about it. Then I found this poem and thought it said things better than anything I could say. I put my little diddy after the poem if you still feel like reading it.

LIGHTENING THE LOAD

The first thing we have to do

is to notice
that we've loaded down this camel


with so much baggage


we'll never get through the desert alive.


Something has to go.

Then we can begin to dump

the thousand things


we've brought along


until even the camel has to go


and we're walking barefoot


on the desert sand.

There's no telling what will happen then.


But I've heard that someone,


walking in this way,


has seen a burning bush.

-- Francis Dorff, O. Praem.

The scripture for the day was from James 1, the verse about sin being conceived and then growing up into death. My busyness outside of God’s plan, and ignoring Sabbath principles, may be conceived in what seems like innocence, and may even be admired as a strong work ethic. But, if it is born out of vanity and selfish motives, and this work “succeeds”, eventually it grows up to be bigger than life, spinning out of control, consuming me. And when it is fully-grown, and I have given myself over to this pattern of work and I can’t escape it, something in me dies.

On that note-

Rest and blessings,

Jeromy

Rehab

They tried to make me go to rehab, I said, “No, no, no”.

-Amy Winehouse

My songwriter friend Chad is taking a sabbatical next month. He says he hates music so he needs some time away from it to recapture the love of his art. (I hate exercise so I’ve been on sabbatical from it for about a year now) Every time Chad and I get together recently we end up talking about his impending hiatus and our song goes unfinished. Chad’s a thinker-talker-sharer. He’s good at opening up his insides, which is what probably makes him a good songwriter and a good hang. Chad’s worried about wasting away his sabbatical watching Sportscenter so yesterday we made a long list of things he could do to stay focused and renew his mind. The items included walking, riding bike, taking cooking lessons, taking Communion, reading, working a soup kitchen, horseback riding, and planting a garden. All of it, we agreed, would keep him busy and help him get in touch with the ancient paths spoken on in Jeremiah 6:16. That verse goes on to promise that if we walk that ancient road we will find rest of our souls. But we have to walk, sometimes a long way.

Resting is not a vacation. Like the weekend Jennifer and I spent at the Ritz-Carlton several years ago. Somebody gave us a coupon for a room there so we flew to Florida and pretended to be rich people for a couple of days. We read by the pool under an umbrella and ordered ice waters and stole the plastic cups to take home. That’s fun but it’s usually not what spiritual rest looks like. Many times it’s more like rehab and rehab is hard, and if you’re in it to succeed, it can take a long time and you don’t get out until you are ready to go back into society. Sometimes God sends us into this wilderness rehab against our will, like the Israelites and their forty years in the desert, and sometimes we chose it ourselves like Jesus’ forty day wilderness fast following his baptism. Either way the outcome is good, like God is good.

April will likely be a long, hard, beautiful, restful, sorrowful month for Chad. God will be intertwined in both the joy and sorrow and Chad will feel peace (oneness) with Him in all of it. God will probably heal Chad’s hatred for music in a completely different way than we expected and Chad will surely write hit singles about it. Then we’ll get together in May and he’ll buy me lunch and tell me all about it over crab cakes and diet coke and hopefully we’ll finish our song.