Archive for November, 2009

Our Empty Thanksgiving Table

Friday, November 27th, 2009

Our table was completely empty this Thanksgiving. We had planned on a family dinner here in our dining room for 8 – Gordon and myself, our three sons, our daughter-in-law, our new baby granddaughter and a friend. We cancelled Thanksgiving dinner at 10 AM on Thanksgiving Day, right when I had been expecting to put the turkey in the oven.

At 3 AM on Thanksgiving morning our 19 year old son John, just in from college, developed abdominal pain so bad that Gordon took him to the emergency room. He was admitted to the hospital. It turns out he has a place in his small intestines that’s inflamed and infected. Don’t know why. It just happened. So they put him on IVs and started pumping him with antibiotics and talked about doing surgery. That’s when I called off Thanksgiving dinner.

John was opposed to surgery because the doctor estimated a 2 week recovery time. The next two weeks are full of projects and exams that will cap off his whole semester of studies. We prayed and reassured him. And the doctor took a “wait and see” approach to the surgery, giving him 24 hours to see if things improved.

Gordon and I ate Thanksgiving dinner at a McDonald’s in the hospital. I had a salad and Gordon had a double cheese burger. Back in the hospital room, John had a few ice chips.

Strangely enough, even with cheeseburgers and fast food salads and ice chips, Thanksgiving still happened. We were grateful that John was home and not off at college when he got sick. We couldn’t help but be grateful for the emergency room doctor who was alert enough to see that John really needed help. For the medicines that can fight infections. For the medical staff who spent Thanksgiving working. Even for that awful stuff you swallow so they can see what’s going in your stomach.

As I rode down the hospital elevator to go home, two men in rough laborer’s clothes rode down with me. I smiled and said, “Happy Thanksgiving. And they responded with a hearty “Happy Thanksgiving” back. And I knew that Thanksgiving can happen anywhere.
Even in a hospital elevator amongst strangers.

See Picture to my blog at

http://www.ourprayer.org/Singlepost/user/KarenBarber/?p_BlogId=6416370

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Avoiding Bad Shoe Days

Thursday, November 19th, 2009

Here’s a picture of my morning prayer walk shoes. Do you think it might be time to retire them?

I’m not fussy about the stains on them, but I know it’s time for new prayer shoes when the material on top starts tearing up. When that happens and I walk down the grassy bank to the pond for a moment of meditation, my feet get soaking wet from the dew, or the left-over rain water or from the sprinkler water on the grass. I end up with wet toes.

Someone a few years back coined the phrase “bad hair day” but I believe that a bad shoe day is ten times worse than a bad hair day. That’s because bad hair is only cosmetic. Bad shoes can leave you limping and blistered and plain worn out and unable to get anything done.

One of the worst shoe days I ever had was on a mission trip to Honduras. I had worn a former set of prayer shoes in equally deplorable condition because of the muck and mire of the rural Honduras village where the nearest paved road was 50 miles away and where cattle and horses and chickens wander free. Why wear new shoes that might get ruined? Unfortunately, my old prayer shoes decided to literally give up their soles in the middle of a work project. The sole completely ripped off of the tops of the shoes. Luckily, the guys on the team had duct tape. I wrapped duct tape around the nose of my shoes and the soles and limped along for the rest of the week. It proved very amusing to the villagers.

Lately I’ve been learning how important it is to not be caught off guard with fear and distractions when you’re trying to get things done in a new ministry. I’ve been consciously praying Ephesians 6:13-18 where it tells us to put on the whole armor of God so we’ll be able to stand our ground. It tells us to have our feet fitted with the readiness that comes from the gospel of peace. That’s great advice! Shoes should be something you should be able to forget you have on. They should be well fitted. Simply having them on makes you ready for action. And good shoes bring peace of mind when you’re out walking around in muck.

Have you put on a good pair of prayer shoes today?

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A Salute to My Veterans – My Father, My Husband and My Sons

Wednesday, November 11th, 2009

I found myself getting a little emotional today on Veteran’s Day. That’s because veterans aren’t an anonymous group of strong men marching in a parade. They are my father, my husband and my sons.

My late father enlisted in the Navy during World War II. He certainly wasn’t the soldier or even the sailor type. He was a Minnesota boy who got violently seasick on the transport ship taking him to his duty station in the Pacific on a supply base in the Easter Islands. He worked in a Quonset hut typing supply orders. He wasn’t very good at that either, but he was a dependable worker. The climate was steamy. He told me that they had to keep an electric light bulb burning in their foot locker to keep the leather on their shoes from getting moldy.

Before I met my husband Gordon, he served in the Army for two years in the Vietnam War Era. He was based in Okinawa, half a world away from his home in North Carolina, doing administrative work helping run the base. Our oldest son, Jeff, served as an engineer in the Air Force for four years in Colorado Springs.

Our middle son Chris was graduating from college with an Army R.O.T.C. scholarship when the Iraq War began. He was trained in field artillery and stationed at Ft. Bragg, N.C. He went “Airborne” and became a paratrooper, learning how to jump out of planes at low altitudes in full gear.

We put a huge yellow bow on the pine tree out front here at home when he served in Afghanistan for 4 months. Later Chris was deployed to Iraq for 18 months and we put up the same yellow bow. It was a prayer anchor that I passed every morning on my prayer walk on my way down the driveway. It was a true lesson in trust and dependence on God to have a son in so far away in harm’s way.

When Chris first arrived in Iraq, he was a platoon leader, leading his men out on missions “outside the wire” in hostile territory. He earned the Bronze Star. What a joy it was to finally take down the old yellow bow, full of pines needles and faded and frayed from rain and sun. This is the second Veteran’s Day since Chris has gotten out of the Army. He’s working toward an MBA and is the founder of a website called www.seriousrunning.com I sent him an email today thanking him for his service and telling him how proud I am of him.

Maybe you get a little emotional on Veteran’s Day, too. Out of my four veterans – my father, my husband and my two sons – only one of them has been called upon to fire a rifle in hostile territory. Yet all of them have served well, giving their time and their service. They have set aside their lives of comfort and gone to new and far away places to perform their assigned duties. I am proud and honored that they are and will forever be the brave men in my life.

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Lesson from the Triplets on My Vision Walk

Thursday, November 5th, 2009

I run into the triplets at their school bus stop many mornings on the vision part of my prayer walk. One minute I’m praying for someone with a vision for a comfort blanket ministry and the next minute I’m watching a private reality show starring six-year-old triplets and their sainted mom.

The triplets – two boys and a girl – started out the school year in August in a free-for-all of early morning mayhem as they pushed and jostled and protested, “I was here first!” trying to be first in line at the bus stop. I witnessed some amazing sprints on six year old legs from the garage door up the driveway to the bus stop with school bags bobbing like parachutes on their backs.

On one memorable day I was treated to a perfect ten performance of a defiant child. One little girl and one boy were standing sober as judges at the bus stop while Saint Mom dragged the final little boy up the driveway literally kicking and screaming. He was stiff legged, wailing, “No! I don’t want to go!” On that particular morning I believe I witnessed one of Saint Mom’s finest moments. The school bus pulled up. Kerplunk, Kerplunk. A little girl’s feet hit the high bus steps. Kerplunk, kerplunk. A little boy’s feet hit the high bus steps. Suddenly all sound was sucked out of the triplet who had been kicking and screaming. As he faced the inevitable yawning abyss of the open school bus door he felt his mother’s no-turning-back presence squarely behind him. “Oh,” his face read, “Other children on the bus are watching.” Kerplunk, kerplunk. He got on the bus without a further whimper.

The weather has changed and so have the triplets. Most days they actually walk to the bus stop. They stand in a 1-2-3 line ten feet back from where the bus halts. They do not budge from this spot until Saint Mom declares that the bus is at a complete stop and it is safe for them to file toward the door. Order has slowly been fashioned out of chaos.

I used to think that the triplets were an interruption to my vision prayers, but now I see that they’re really messengers. In my past blogs I mentioned my big vision I’ve been praying for 9 years. Sometimes things seem to be going way too slow and I want to run as fast as I can to get on the bus. Then I get discouraged. Isn’t it my turn to be the very first one in line? Other days, I’m back there kicking and screaming about doing the necessary nuts and bolts work that I hate doing. In the Kingdom of God, just like at bus stops, order and maturity matter. The key is to keep on growing one day and one prayer at a time.

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