Spitting on a Rose

Today one of my daughters and I were talking on the phone about the influence grandparents have on grandchildren.  She commented that it was too bad all my grandparents had died by the time I was 13.  She wondered what would be different about me if I had had that on-going interaction into adulthood.  She wondered if Grandma Kratzat would have taught me to tat.

I told her one thing I was certain was that Grandpa Baumeister would have taught me how to grow roses.   He had a small backyard in the city of Buffalo, but he had many roses, and I was fascinated.  I particularly was curious about how he propagated new rose bushes by placing a rose with part of its stem attached in the ground under a mason jar.  To me, it seemed like a miracle that a new rose bush could be grown in this way.

When Grandpa B was in the hospital and seemed to be dying, I was taken to see him.  As I bent down to hug him, he held me close and with tears said, “I am so sorry.  I promised to show you how I grow my roses this summer, but I won’t be here to do that.”  I was not quite 12 years old and had no idea what to say.  I just continued to hug him.

Before talking with my daughter today, it had not occurred to me that the information on how to do this might now be available on the internet, so I went searching.  Sure enough, the technique is described.  It does say one should use a “rooting hormone” to stimulate the develop of the roots.  I am fairly certain this would not have been available commercially 65 years ago.  I wondered what naturally occurring rooting hormones might be available.  I found a list:  cinnamon, aloe, apple cider vinegar, honey, aspirin and saliva.  As I thought about each and what the likelihood of Grandpa using it might be, I thought, “Ha!  Saliva!”  I can picture him spitting on the cut bottom of the stem.  What’s more, I can picture that had he been able to show me his technique, he would have said, “OK, Ruthie, spit on this!”  And since, a young lady spitting was frowned on, it would have been a delicious secret between Grandpa and me as the rose bush grew, that it had required my saliva.

When I get to heaven and ask him about this, I might be disappointed if I find out he used cinnamon or vinegar from Grandma’s cupboard or aspirin from the medicine cabinet.  I prefer to think that something of himself went into those rose bushes.

Discerning Truth

I Corinthians 13 is a very familiar passage from the Bible…often known as the Love Chapter.  Recently a phrase from that section of scripture hit me in a new way as I read it from the Phillips translation.

…if there is knowledge, it will be swallowed up in truth.

This can’t happen soon enough to suit me.  There is so much supposed knowledge floating around these days, and I am certain that some of it is not “truth.”  It can’t possibly all be truth, because some of what is purported to be knowledge is in direction contradiction to other pieces of knowledge.  Truth could be staring someone in the face and not be at all obvious.

This problem is largely due to the prevalence of social media which has given absolutely everyone a platform for their ideas…a way to disseminate them unchallenged.  Any contradictions can be dismissed as coming from someone less knowledgeable or with a significant bias, and who’s to judge that?  The purveyors of the “knowledge” are not personally known to the consumers of it.

In simpler times, there were, of course, crackpots on both sides of issues, but these individuals did not have a very large sphere of influence.  Most were spreading their opinions among family and friends or in a local enough way that everyone knew someone who knew them.  The fact that they were unstable or given to really crazy ideas could easily be determined.  Those close to them knew their level of expertise.  They could not claim to have a body of knowledge on a subject when their level of education and experience were well known or easily verified.

Not so today!  Any nut case can get on the internet and spew their message.  He/she can claim to be educated or to have had firsthand experience, and we have no idea whether this is totally false or a smidge exaggerated.

This is dangerous!  Not everyone is discerning.  Many perfectly intelligent people are being taken in because they think they are listening to experts who “know” the facts.  Some of these facts influence life and death decisions.

Our world is so broken.  Only the one who defines truth can straighten out this mess and swallow up our pitiful knowledge with absolute TRUTH.

Even so, come Lord Jesus.

Wishing I Was Wrong

There have been a number of times in my life when I wished I was wrong….oh, how I wished I was wrong!

One day while I was in nursing school, I was assigned to care for a very large lady who had had gall bladder surgery.  In those day, there was no laparoscopic surgery, so there was a fairly large incision high in the abdomen on the right side.  This often caused people not to want to breathe deeply and to avoid moving around.  It was the nurses’ job to make them do deep breathing, even if it was uncomfortable, and to get them out of bed and walking to avoid both pneumonia and pulmonary embolisms resulting from blood pooling and clotting in the legs.

My obese patient refused to get out of bed and was even resistive to moving around.  Every time I came into the room, she had talked someone into cranking up the knee gatch.  I tried to explain that this was a dangerous position for her, as it would cause blood to pool in the vessels in her upper legs.

Her response was, “You young things think you know everything!  I know my own body, and I will know when I am ready to move around.”

Complicating the situation was the fact that she was very good friends with her doctor’s wife, who showed up with a girdle, so that she could hold things in when she felt ready to get up.  I wasn’t convinced that was a good idea because I was concerned about vessels in the groin area being compressed, but how does one tactfully object to what the doctor’s wife is doing with the patient.

I was not working the next day and was relaxing in the dorm when I got a phone call.  We all knew we were required to watch a certain number of autopsies.  A friend who was working called to clue me in to the opportunity to watch one that morning.  I inquired who the patient was.  My heart sank when I learned it was my patient the prior day.

I observed the autopsy that morning and two things about it are vivid to me.  One was that she had eaten scrambled eggs for breakfast, and they were in her stomach undigested.  The other….she died of a pulmonary embolism.  Blood had pooled in the leg vessels and formed a clot.  The clot let loose and traveled to her lungs, and that was it.

Sometimes a young thing knows what she is talking about.

I am old and sometimes I still know what I am talking about.

I will never watch another autopsy.  I hope I don’t have to pay my respects at any coffins.

I want to be wrong.  Oh…how I want to be wrong!

 

No Farther

I declared, “You may come this far, but no farther.  Here your proud waves must stop.” Job 38:11

The proud waves roll toward the shore,

Creeping farther and farther,

Onto the barren sand they come

Sweeping away debris.

 

Walking along in the surf,

I feel the outward pull.

I stay in the shallows

Not wanting to be swept away.

 

But what if I stray too far?

What if I don’t see the larger cresting wave?

What if I am encompassed, overpowered,

And pulled into the deep?

 

There is a boundary set

By a more powerful hand.

“This far, but no farther”

The Almighty roars.

 

The proud waves of evil roll,

Attempting to sweep all of us

Outward through the harmless foam

Into the depths and darkness.

 

But the Almighty has set a boundary.

With a voice louder than the surf,

He roars “This far, but no farther.

Enough!  It is finished.”

 

Schadenfreude

I read the word schadenfreude today, and I have been pondering it.

I take absolutely no pleasure in the pain of others…even those who have made poor decisions that have led to their troubles, or those who have harmed me in the past.  I would not consider gleefully dancing on anyone’s grave.  It would be more likely that I would stand next to it and weep.  I cringe as I watch some make ruin of their lives.  Sometimes I want to stand by the side of the road and scream, “the bridge is out ahead!”  But usually, I am ignored as people I know and love speed by with pedal to the metal.

I know that what I see as right may not be RIGHT.  I know there are differences of opinion, and plenty of room for alternative choices in life.  But, as an old lady who has been around the block a few times, I can often spot trouble before it actually happens.  The degree to which I am correct in my assessment of situations is a bit scary…even to me.  Sometimes I “know” things I don’t really want to know, because I can’t do anything about the situations anyway.

There are current social and political issues about which I have opinions.  Other intelligent and morally upright people may disagree with some of those opinions.  Only time will tell whose perspective is closest to truth.  Sometimes I would really rather be wrong.  If it turns out I am right, there will be grief rather than schadenfreude!

How Long?

How can a life be so precious to one,

And yet so cheap to another?

One man sacrifices his life to save lives.

Another sacrifices his life to take lives.

 

Good and evil coexisting,

Love and hatred confronting each other.

The devil laughs gleefully,

Almighty God weeps, biding his time.

 

Some of us stand at a distance,

Others must enter the conflict,

Live on the razor’s edge,

Tomorrow uncertain, unknown.

 

But when the agony creeps back to us,

A staggering reality pierces the soul,

A black hole expands at one’s core,

Swallowing all joy and light.

 

“How long, O Lord, holy and true,

 until you judge and avenge…”

       (Revelation 6:10)

Too Soon Old

It is amazing how gradually loss of energy creeps up on one.  I have tried to do too much recently, and I find myself exhausted.  The whole aging thing is such a sneaky process.  One day I was running through life full tilt, not feeling the need to sit down and take a break, and it seems like only a day or two later, I do a simple task and then sink into a chair.  Doing several loads of laundry used to be incidental to doing numerous other tasks during a day.  Now it is the whole project for the day.

A couple of nights ago, I woke up having slept like a log after an exhausting day.  I lay there awake thinking with amazement of what I used to be capable.  It amused me to think that as a nurse the summer I was 21, I worked at a large hospital in Buffalo, NY, and sometimes I was the only RN for six units.  There was an LPN and aide on each floor, but I was responsible for medications, procedures the LPN couldn’t do and decision making.  One night I had two patients dying at the same time, and they were two floors apart.  I wasn’t satisfied with the speed of the elevators that night and spent the night running up and down the stairs, in order to be on top of the situation.  I confess that now walking up two flights of stairs sometimes tires me, especially if I am carrying something.

On another occasion, I was working as a float on the night shift at hospital from which I graduated.  I was a full-time college student and was paying my own way by working on weekends.  When I checked in before 11, the supervisor told me that they were really short staffed and asked me to cover the orthopedic unit.  It was a very large unit with two separate nurses’ stations.  The hospital was the length of a city block and the ortho unit was about 2/3 or ¾  of the length.  I ran from one end to the other all night.  When I clocked out in the morning, the supervisor said, “You are the only person I know who would have agreed to do that.  Anyone else I asked would have turned around and walked out of here.”  I have no idea where that energy came from….except YOUTH.

So there my old bones were laying in the bed with my old brain pondering my fatigue.  We old people watch toddlers run around, and we feel tired just watching them.  Where does that energy come from? we wonder.  Here we are with the storehouse of knowledge and painfully acquired wisdom of old age, but the energy to utilize it is beginning to fade.  We would like to impart some of the knowledge and wisdom to the younger generations, but some of them think what we have to offer is outdated and irrelevant.

My Dad used to say, “We are too soon old and too late smart.”

Sometimes we encounter younger people who are interested to learn from us.  A young lady sitting in the plane with us recently asked us what the secret of our long happy marriage was.  It is nice to be able to share what one has learned with a younger person and feel they are genuinely interested.

But, whether or not they are interested, I will try to share what I have learned with those who still have the energy to implement it.

Very important piece to pass on:  The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. 

Proverbs 9:10