It Must Be Me

There is something about wanting to be able to be sure of something that drives most of our human behavior. In our infancy, that something, at least for most, is the unfailing love and attention of our mother and, hopefully our father. Somehow we know, even at an early age that everything will be alright because Mom and Dad care more about our welfare than their own. Only as we get a little older do we become a little less sure of their benevolence because they insist that we cannot do some of the things we want to when we want to. At that point, we begin consciously or unconsciously to look elsewhere for that thing about which we can be sure.

Sometimes that thing in which we begin to trust is friends and acquaintances with all the attending problems associated with peer pressure. So we continue to search for heroes, folks who have been exemplary in how they have conducted their lives. We may even acknowledge that our parents  pretty well fit that pattern. But it's too late for that since we already decided we could do better outside of their influence. We learn of great people in history, glamorized as they are in history books and think for awhile that people like those first Americans who framed our Constitution surely can be trusted as something in which we can be sure.

Fast forward to the present in which we still hope for something that we can be sure is true. Our present situation in this country, in fact in this world, seems pretty bleak in that heroes have been hard to come by. Those we have elected hoping that they might have concern for the common good either overlook, or downright refute, that responsibility. So we still want to believe there is something of which we can be sure.

Some days I think it must be me that is fouled up because everything that I thought was surely true has somehow turned out to be otherwise. Then I remember. There was One who came into the world to exemplify the sure truth. He even dared say, "I am the way and the truth." I hope that any who might read this and get feeling as though the truth is getting difficult to find will turn their attention to Christ whose birth we will soon celebrate. Take Him up on His promise of eternal life, be born again and realize that there is truth and life beyond the confusion and disappointment this world often offers. May the blessings of a loving God sustain you and give you peace in a less than peaceful world. 

Soup is Super and Supper

One of the reasons for relative good health I’ve enjoyed I believe can be credited to homemade soup. Especially during the cooler months, there is always soup of some variety either on the stove or in the refrigerator once the quantity gets down to the size that makes keeping it on the back porch no longer necessary (my soup pot is about 12 quarts). Soup is good and generally good for you and can be made from most anything edible. Some of my better ones can never be repeated because the ingredients were whatever happened to be left over.

I usually make soup for a monthly staff meeting at church where I volunteer as growth group coordinator. Most times, the soup gets an appreciative response or at least a “Thank you”. This last month however was obviously a winner when a request was made for the recipe. Hesitantly, I share the recipe for “Killer Split-pea and Ham”. I say hesitantly because sharing recipes especially when the measurements are less than exact, can cause strained relationships. There was an old Ann Landers column that highlighted the problem with a poem.  It began:

            I didn’t have potatoes

            So I used a cup of rice.

            I didn’t have paprika,

            So I used some other spice.

There was more. But you get the idea. The recipe follower was angry that the dish they had hoped to recreate was nothing like the original and accused the recipe giver of being dishonest about the ingredients.

In any event this is one of my favorites:

            Ingredients:

            1 meaty ham bone

            2 one pound bags split peas

`           1 large onion diced

            Several cloves of garlic (never have felt the need to hold back here)

            (secret ingredient alert) Half a rutabaga peeled and diced

            Salt 1-1/2 tablespoon and Pepper 1 teaspoon

            Water enough to cover all ingredients and nearly fill a 12 qt. pot.

Bring the whole mess to a boil and reduce to simmer. After about an hour pull out the ham bone and set aside to trim off the meat when cooled. Allow the rest to simmer until all ingredients are well softened. Use an immersion blender to puree all the stuff in the pot. (If you do not have an immersion blender, this is reason enough to get one.) Chop the trimmed off meat and add to the pot bringing it all back to the boiling point. Adjust salt and pepper. (Do they make non-adjustable salt and pepper?)

Like I said, this was good enough for a recipe request. Hopefully you have a good time with it. That brings me to another issue. A fellow teacher and I lunched together most of the years I was teaching, and lunch usually included soup. We made up a term that we used to judge a soup characteristic called the flatulegentic scale. On a scale of 1 to 10 we guessed the likelihood that the soup in question would cause flatulence in the partaker. A soup with a rating of 1 meant that virtually no one would know you had it. A soup with a rating of 10 probably meant our wives would ask us to sleep on the couch. Although it is hardly scientific, I would rate the above around an 8. Forewarned is forearmed.

Granddad's Truck, Part 2

Earlier this year, I wrote about the Model A truck that my grandfather used in some of my fondest memories. Somehow many of the adventures became more "interesting" as a result of Granddad trying to adapt his truck for chores that he had once done with horse drawn equipment. Ah, the joy of new technology.

One of the chores that was a primary endeavor during the summer was the mowing, raking and gathering of hay for the cows and getting that winter sustenance into the hay mow of the barn. One of the improvements Granddad made to his truck was a series of wooden racks and extensions that allowed for a substantial increase in the amount of hay that could be hauled in a single trip. Much of the hay was mowed by hand with a scythe and once raked and dried got loaded into the truck with pitch forks then hauled to the barn.

Within sight of our home, Granddad had mowed a field and in the process uncovered a nest of yellow jackets. He swore vengeance for the several stings he endured and plotted a plan for the small plot of hay that had to be left unmown. When he returned the following day to gather the hay and filled his truck with a pile of hay that dwarfed the truck, he threw a couple fork fulls of hay on the yellow jacket nest and set it ablaze. The satisfaction of giving those little demons what they deserved was quickly turned to panic when he realized that the fire had jumped to the load on the truck.

Mercifully, the truck started easily for a change and Granddad headed for home at a speed rarely achieved in that little old Model A. What an exciting display for a ten year old who just happened to be doing whatever ten year olds did during the summer months. I watched in amazement as the load of burning hay accelerated toward home; disappearing as a ball of flame as it crested the hill and went out of sight. Fortunately the fuel tank on Model A's are in front of the firewall. Had it been in the rear somewhere, I fear that would have been the last memory of Granddad I would have had.

My grandmother had done laundry that day and it was fortuitous that she had not yet emptied the rinse tubs. She responded to Granddad's plea, "Hey Ma, Bring water." The two of them carried buckets of water and managed to extinguish the fire which had spread to the tar paper like roof of the truck. The wooden racks were pretty much gone. The tiny rear window had broken out from the heat and the handle of Granddad's "favorite" pitch fork had been lost. But the little old truck survived to provide additional aggravation. After that incident, whenever the truck acted up, Granddad could be depended upon to say, "...should have pulled the damn thing off in the field and let her burn."

A Real Turn Off

One of the down sides of woodworking is the often noisy environment in which it occurs. It is inevitable that all that noise, especially without hearing protection, will result in an accelerated loss of hearing. Those of you who know me are no doubt aware of the hearing loss with which I operate. When I consider the difficulties others endure, mine is a rather minor handicap. Never the less, in my belief that all things happen for a reason, I've come to acknowledge that not hearing as well as I once did must have some part in a greater plan than mine.

One of the things that has changed, due in no small part because of hearing loss, is the amount of time I spend in front of the TV. I fear one vice has simply substituted for another in that my laptop (can you say facebook?) takes up an inordinate amount of my time these days. All in all, I believe it has been a great trade off. Even though closed caption might provide some compensation for not being able to hear what someone might be saying, I have come to believe that, for the most part, what they are saying doesn't amount to much and I began appreciate words from people I really know and  care about.

Getting out from in front of the tube (guess there really aren't any tubes in there any more) is something I can, at this point, truly recommend. I can read three news stories in the time it takes a talking head to tell me one, with the advantage of deciding for myself whether the story is truly newsworthy. And although, it's no substitute for a genuine face to face visit, posts from friends on facebook have taken the place of the impersonal clap trap some stranger on TV has to offer. 

Don't misunderstand. I am as discouraged as the next one about the crazy state of affairs in this world. But the guarantee that Jesus gave that, "In this world you will have trouble" accounts for all that craziness. Time away from the TV has given me contemplation opportunities and the will to face tomorrow because again in His words, "but be of good cheer. I have overcome the world." 

Thanks for taking the time to read my ramblings and make a comment or reaction. That beats anything that might happen on TV.

 

Stumped Again

The folks who show up at Out of the Woodwork are a pretty diverse lot, male for the most part. Even back in the days of my public school teaching, most of my students were boys. However there were always a few more adventurist girls who elected to take classes in industrial arts. When that first started happening, it became apparent that the girls were generally better at patience and perseverance, more willing to spend the extra time sanding or fitting to get things just right. Another distinction was the creativity that seemed more likely to be a product of the female mind than was likely with the boys. So, in light of those remembrances, women have never been discouraged from being part of the scene at the workshop.

This past year a woman began coming to Out of the Woodwork and reminded me of those long ago days when the really challenging projects were often undertaken by the girls. Of course today the availability of seeing virtually anything being done on a You tube video makes for some pretty wild, "I think I could do that," opportunities. So it was no big surprise when my new student came to me with the idea of making a table using the stump of a tree as the support pedestal. Thinking I had discouraged the idea when I indicated that we would have to find an appropriate stump, I stopped thinking too seriously about the logistics of making a table out of a stump.

I had underestimated that perseverance factor that I mentioned above. My new student stopped at the staging area that the construction company that is widening a local road was using and asked if she might have one of the hundreds of stumps that were piled up waiting to be ground into mulch. The excavator operator was kind enough to pull the stump of choice off the pile and put it aside. After several hours of pressure washing and chainsaw trimming the stump was ready for sanding and final shaping. One of the more challenging details was hollowing out the stump to reduce the weight to more manageable size. Fortunately my large chainsaw has a bar long enough to go all the way through and although it was a bit of a workout, the stump pedestal is now hollow and about half the weight it was originally.

Projects like this one are always undertaken with an attitude of, "Let's give it a try." knowing that it could be start over time whenever this doing stuff for the first time doesn't work out. So it is with all of our lives. Being comfortable, not trying something new for fear of failure, refusing to move out of comfort zones are all best avoided. We come into this world as part of God's design and moving closer to what he has designed us for is not unlike tackling an unlikely project like making a table pedestal out of an old tree stump. Don't be stumped. Let the best Carpenter shape you into His special design.

School Days

The days of the one room school house was pretty much over by the time I started school. The one room schools were consolidated once it became practical to bus some folks to a central location beyond walking distance for many of the school-age children in the rural areas. The first six years of school found me in the Bushkill Consolidated School. As we talked about the needs of public education in the men's growth group that I lead, we compared the education systems to which we were exposed growing up.

The Bushkill Consolidated School was attended by my father and at that time consisted of grades one through 10. For many folks that was adequate for their ambitions, However, grades eleven and twelve, required catching a ride with the mail bus to East Stroudsburg. By the time I started school, the Bushkill building housed grades one through six. There were two teachers; one for grades one to three and another for grades four to six. As with so many things that happen to us when we are young, I appreciated those teachers and their dedication only long after being in their classrooms.

It was a remarkably good system, assuming the teachers were good disciplinarians, and the ones I had were certainly that. In first grade, we were in the room when lessons were taught to the second and third graders. In essence, by the time we were promoted to fourth grade (the room with the big kids) we had experienced and previewed all three grades three times. Learning to work independently while the other two grades got most of the teacher's attention was an unbelievably valuable lesson in itself. Of course, the process went the same with the next three grades as well. The system also gave the teacher the opportunity to have students participate in lessons above their grade if they seemed ready for that and to require students to sit in on lessons from previous grades if review was in order.

 Those wonderful teachers were responsible for the whole ball of wax. They not only were masterful in the academic subjects, but taught music and art as well. The recess time built into each day even provided physical education. The weather had to be pretty extreme in order for recess time to be held indoors. It all got done without duplicators, calculators, word processors, printers or TV. Even then, the teachers were innovative. When they thought it important that we see the inauguration of our new president, the whole school walked to the closest home that had a TV so we could witness Dwight Eisenhower being sworn in. I thank those teachers, living or not, for working so hard, In the words of Sandy Mccaullif, "They touched the future." 

Stumped

One of the pleasures of the way we work wood at Out of the Woodwork is that we often see the entire process from the time a tree is felled to the finished project. Reminders of from where the lumber comes is out in the woods in the form of the stumps that generally last for a long time. Six years ago, as part of our forest stewardship plan, we did a thinning cutting and sold the timber. I was reminded of that venture as I looked through some photos from back in that time period and was reminded that although we have nothing to compare to the giant trees on the western part of the country, there are some pretty good sized trees around these parts.

The photo in this post is of the stump of one of the trees that was cut in the thinning cutting. It is a Red Oak and if you blow up the picture you can see that it was close to four feet in diameter. There were a lot of trees taken out of the area where this stump is located and the amazing thing is, if you overlook the stumps you would hardly guess that trees had been removed. That's the purpose of a thinning cutting. By removing harvest-able trees, the ones left behind get larger and tend to fill the openings in the canopy left but their relatives who have moved on to be furniture and firewood. There's no good way to know where the lumber that was part of that big Oak ended it's journey. We can only hope that it served a good purpose and the resulting projects and the craftsmanship that went into them are appreciated as true gifts from our Creator.

The stumps are silent reminders of the way of all living things. Eventually they die. Just as we hope that the lumber from a tree is used wisely and for good purpose, so we must take care to see that our lives also used for good purpose. I truly believe that each person is a creation of God and is created with His purpose in mind. However, we have been given free will and therefore, unlike the tree, we get to choose what purpose we pursue. Also, unlike the tree, we have been assured that when we die we have just begun to live eternally if we believe in God's Son and live like Him in God-honoring purpose. We will not leave stumps behind. But then God has something much better in mind.

Embrace Contemplation

Convalescing with a broken ankle or other injury that keeps you from doing the things you normally do causes some forced change in lifestyle. After two and a half months of being away from some common activity like driving yourself and walking any further than necessary for anything, I find myself checking off the things I am doing again "for the first time". As you might suspect, one of the "firsts" I really anticipated was getting back to the wood shop and picking up where projects (my own as well as other's) left off back in November. Although things are back to a pretty normal schedule, the feeling is a little different and perhaps looking at why it's different is worth examining.

Although the wood shop is working along fine, it gives me pause to remember the knowledge that one day will be the last day I spend in that place I love. That is the kind of thought that occurs to one during a time when we are slowed down and given time to think about what it is we truly love and the fact that whatever those things may be, one day they will be no more. This, of course, is true of things more important than wood working. A time of convalescence can be healthy if it allows us to consider just what our priorities are; things like relationships, especially with family and friends and the ways we can best serve in this short temporal life.

At our cores we all want our lives to have made a difference and when one convalesces thoughts of just how our lives may have really mattered. Stephen Covey in his classic best seller "The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People" listed as "Habit #2 - Begin with the end in mind. He suggested we imagine our own funeral and what we would want those in attendance to say about us. Just what was it about how you lived that left this world a better place than when you arrived. It's fair to say that this can happen only when we put others ahead of ourselves and humbly repent when we find ourselves involved in a bunch of self-serving activity.

I have come to believe that living with the intention of serving others can only be fully accomplished with regular attention to worshiping God. Someone has said that going to church doesn't make you a Christian any more than standing in a garage makes you a car. The truth is only in a church can you hope to find the encouragement and accountability to truly follow Christ. This is a kinda funny place to end up a post about wood working. But then a period of convalescing gets you to thinking about what really matters and what it takes to make it happen.

Granddad's Truck

When my grandfather acquired an old, used Model A truck, it should have made life on the farm a bit easier. And had it not been for the fact any training that Granddad had was behind the wheel of a Model T, it would have been a straight forward improvement. Unfortunately the familiarity with the controls of the Model T and Granddads refusal to adapt to the "new" technology caused more than a few incidents which we can now look back upon with humor. Come to think of it, since no one was seriously injured in any of his mishaps, they were funny even right after they happened.

One of the differences between a Model T and a Model A was that the Model T had only a hand throttle. The Model A retained a hand throttle but additionally had a foot controlled throttle as well. Granddad never got the hang of using the foot throttle and always used just the hand throttle which stayed where you put it, sorta like a precursor to cruise control. Another difference between the T and the A was the transmission. In the T there were only two forward speeds; selected by either having the pedal pushed in (low) or left out (high), The A had three speeds and required moving the gearshift much as you would in any standard shift vehicle. This was too complicated for Granddad's liking so he rarely used anything but second gear and reverse if absolutely necessary.

Granddad's refusal to adapt to the modern conveniences of the Model A combined with the slowing reflexes we all encounter in old age came together in an unfortunate way one bright spring day about sixty years ago. Although it was seldom used, the outhouse was never removed from the farm and provided  a welcome relief station when the newer indoor plumbing failed or was occupied. Granddad was coming back to the house in the Model A from some chore sailing along as he usually did in second gear with hand throttle about half way down. Headed for the outhouse and unable to get on the brake in time, he hit the old outhouse a pretty good shot. The outhouse, having been pretty well built shuddered. The Model A bounced back, still in gear and still at half throttle. The second hit was too much and the outhouse collapsed in a heap. Fortunately no one had been in it at the time. Like I said, his mishaps were funny because no one was actually injured.

The outhouse, the Model A, Granddad are all just memories now. I like to believe that even in silly circumstances like these, we are protected by an all loving God. Granddad survived to have more misadventures with the "modern" truck. I was blessed to witness, dare we say be part of, some of those misadventures. Perhaps one of them will provide inspiration for a future post.

Renewal

As we head into 2017, we do well to glance over our shoulders to see from where we have come. This was made much easier for me because of my son Chris' efforts to convert a bunch of my old slides into digital format. He did so with over a thousand images and has intentions of doing more in the coming year. If the old axiom, "A picture is worth a thousand words" is true, his efforts have provided me with over a million words worth of memories. Don't worry. I won't be using nearly that many words in this post even though the ease with which I can now look back over decades is worth at least that many.

A couple of the photos hiding in that pile were of my grandfather who died over fifty years ago. I posted one of them on facebook and was delighted at the "likes" and comments that were generated. I was reminded of how much we humans want to know about people who may have shaped our lives. The common element in our wanting to know about our ancestors is that although technology has changed, human feelings and recognizing the need to evaluate and make necessary changes has always been with us. Just as we anticipate a New Year in 2017, so did Granddad. He started doing so in the 1800's. I've promised myself to write more about him in some future posts assuming God grants me the time and inspiration to do so.

But in the here and now, you and I must continue with the understanding that the brokenness that is human requires a renewed commitment each year, indeed each day, to be more like Christ in how we live and treat one another. My prayer for you and any who might care is to appreciate that with which you have been blessed and to be generous in giving the first fruits of your efforts to God in keeping with his ordained order. As for Granddad, if Heaven is joyous, he is chopping with his double bit axe or mowing with a scythe without any arthritic pain.