Hounds of Heaven

People want believers in Jesus to provide them with some miraculous proof that Jesus, the Son of God, is real and alive. I think all genuine Jesus followers are the miraculous proof of life. It’s easy for Christians to forget that their lives serve as the medium for God’s message to mankind. It’s easy to become complacent about all the carefully orchestrated encounters that lead a person to glimpse a real Jesus for the first time. I do several interviews a year with people who tell me the story of their spiritual lives and how they came to believe in Jesus wholeheartedly rather than just intellectually. All their stories involve relationships with other people. Sometimes those relationships took place at churches, or Bible camps, or revivals but talk earnestly with a believer and you will discover a story of a lost sheep being herded to the safety of a shepherd’s arms by a special operations team of heavenly hounds.

Ever watch a border collie responding to the clicks and whistles of the farmer to move a herd of sheep from point A to point B? They make the sheep go where the farmer wants by every means available to a canine: physical presence, barks, and even growls. If the ewe is stubborn there might even need to be a nip here and there. From the sheep’s point of view it’s harassment but from the farmer’s point of view it’s about getting that sheep where it needs to be in order for it to thrive.

As a child, all I knew of what Christians believed was cobbled together from Christmas television specials and the “Davey and Goliath” children’s television shows on Sunday morning. I suppose that makes Goliath my first hound of heaven. I had a friend in High School that took me to a church production of Joseph and His Amazing Technicolor Dream Coat. Performing in that play was a future boyfriend whose mother would try to introduce me to Advent and saying table grace while holding hands. Years later when I joined Bible Study Fellowship I discovered that she had been a BSF leader at the time I knew her. These seemingly coincidental encounters were, for me, glimpses of the sheepdogs darting behind the rocks and moving me by avoidance down broad paths. But there is nothing random or coincidental about how God woos the people He has created. We just miss the method because we’re lost in our madness.

At college I met this guy who exuded peace and joy. When he smiled, his eyes became two little squinty lines and all you saw was the grin. I didn’t know it at the time, but I became the pet prayer project for him and his dormitory Bible study group. The guys told the girls’ Bible study downstairs about me. Over a two year period, try as I might, I could not shake these people. They were everywhere I went, and they were always happy to see me, like I was somehow special to them. They always offered to help me with my homework, or fix my bicycle, or carry something for me, or go fetch something for me. They would sidle up to me and start friendly conversations. They would stop by my dorm room just to let me know that if I ever needed anything, they were there for me. They had troubles and challenges and personality quirks like everybody else. What made them stand out was that they seemed genuinely hopeful. They moved through life lightly and dealt with things gracefully rather than like people weighed down with dread and bitterness. They creeped me out and fascinated me at the same time. I would tell myself I’d have nothing to do with them and suddenly find myself surrounded by them in the dining commons or the library.

Their ringleader, the smiley one, drove a tiny Civic Honda. Since he was the only car owner amongst the group, eight people would squeeze in to that Honda to get off campus for some fun. When they invited me to brunch on Sunday mornings I should have known the car would stop at church because “it was on the way.” Oh, look, the service is just starting, what a coincidence! I thought I was safe when they invited me out on a Friday night to the movies. We ended up at some warehouse showing of “The Jesus Film.” All the way home I’m sobbing uncontrollably while seven other people compressed into the car are serenely silent and tactfully passing me tissues.

My heavenly hounds’ persistence paid off. Two and a half years of Christ-inspired behavior on their part led me inexorably to my own relationship with Jesus who had given them His compassion towards me. Twenty-nine years later I’m still in touch with a few of those faithful sheepdogs who refused to let me wander off into my own willfulness. I married the Honda driver and our children give us squinty grins. But here’s to those who stalked and yipped and got the occasional kick in the chops for their troubles. I may not get to thank some of them this side of heaven but I am grateful that they surrounded me with prayer and came alongside to guide me with their friendship. And now the one they guided me to communicates His signals in His own subtle ways. It is time for this old dog to get back to work.

Old Lady in the Moonlight

Our German Shepherd/Collie mix, Lady, had seen fifteen Christmases and would not see another. She was down to one working tooth, nearly blind, completely deaf, arthritic, and incontinent. The incontinence had destroyed the wall-to-wall carpet in the living room before I had resorted to doggie diapers. I ripped up the carpet and laid down tile. Lady had the unfortunate tendency to cross the tile and end up splayed upon it like Bambi-on-the-ice, flat on her belly and unable to gain enough traction to stand up. She had lost her resonant German Shepherd “Woof” and could only wheeze “hooth.” Often at night she would hit that tile and end up going “hooth, hooth,” for a long time before someone woke up and came out to pull her back up into a standing position. If it took too long for her to be discovered, her circulation would be so bad that you would have to massage her legs and feet and sort of swing her legs back and forth until she could gain the ability to stand.

One night I awoke from a sound sleep hearing a muffled “hooth, hooth” through the wall. Lady was down and who knew how long she had been there! I flung back the covers and without taking even a moment to put on my glasses or step into slippers I ran down the hallway from the bedroom to the living room and grabbed the forty pound dog up in my arms. Twice I tried to align her four legs under her and get her to stand on her own but she’d start to slide back down. I was trying to massage circulation back into her legs but she started to gag like she was going to throw up and I quickly decided we’d deal with that outside. Awkwardly, with coughing collie in my arms, I got the side door open and was mincing painfully across the patio towards the lawn. Out in the backyard it was California “nippy” cold but not quite freezing. There was a full moon out that December evening and I had a very furry dog keeping my torso warm as I softly swayed with her to keep her legs moving.

Why was I doing this? Buying the delicatessen dog food that she could gum rather than chew, putting her food on a stand so she didn’t have to bend down for it, and changing doggie diapers throughout the day? Because I believe God entrusted Adam, and by extension humanity, with the stewardship of the garden and its inhabitants. When you agree to adopt a dog into your family you commit to caring for it, for better or worse, for as long as there is quality of life. I guess I was doing it because we all grow old and deserve to be remembered for who we were in the prime of life, not necessarily at the tail end. I was doing it because Lady could still wag her tail when I scratched behind her ears.

In her youth, Lady had been a dog of extraordinary talents. We’d been told when we adopted her that she was a “jumper” – we just didn’t appreciate what that meant. We did the first time she launched herself over a six foot wooden fence in pursuit of a cat that had wandered into our yard. The kennel where we boarded her for vacations developed quite a file on Lady D. The first time we left her they tried putting her in a regular kennel and shortly after we left she scaled the six foot chain link fence. After a lovely chase from Lady’s perspective, they put her in a kennel with a roof. She watched her handlers come in and out a few times, and figured out how to flip the kennel latch herself. But in order to create a distraction for her getaway, she also flipped all the other kennel latches, releasing all the inmates in cellblock B. When they finally found her several acres away they put her in a kennel and wired shut her door. It took her awhile but she unwound the wire with her teeth and had another fun romp with the kennel owners. They admitted she was always a friendly and cooperative dog once she was caught.

Even with the gray in her muzzle and the cloudiness in her brown eyes, she was still a beautiful dog. She wasn’t one to gulp her food and when she lay down she’d cross her paws in a lady-like way. People would stop us as we were on our “walkies” to comment what a beautiful dog she was. She walked on a leash beautifully, would let you shake her paw, and she could sit, lie down and play dead on command. Her “stay” and “come” however, was based on whether she found obeying “worth her while.” She could charm a toddler out of a cookie without making a sound. I once found a fresh loaf of baked bread that I had set out on the counter to cool completely hollowed out behind the couch. Sometimes, if I forgot my sunglasses or a grocery coupon and dashed back into the house from the car, I’d find her standing on her hind legs at the kitchen counter, “pilfering” scraps off the not-yet-washed dishes. She’d look at me with some chagrin, as if to say, “Oh, I thought you’d gone already,” then slowly sink back down to all fours and saunter out of the kitchen.

For all her dainty airs, like a Southern heroine from a Tennessee Williams play, Lady had a neurotic, broken side to her personality, brought on by puppyhood trauma. Explosive noises – be it popping balloons, fireworks, gunfire, a car backfire, or thunder – transformed her from Lady Dog to Lunatic Dog. We learned we had to tranquilize her for 4th of July and New Year’s Eve or have 40 pounds of quaking, hysterical canine trying to climb into our armpits or ripping doorframes apart. She once leapt off the balcony of a two-story cabin in Lake Tahoe we were renting for 4th of July. We could only assume fireworks had been set off in the neighborhood but how she made the leap with only a slight limp to show for it we could never be sure. We once had left her contentedly in our mini-van, windows cracked, on a cold winter’s day while we had lunch at an old west sightseeing village. We enjoyed the fake gunfight between the heroes and the bandits until we got back to the parking lot and found that Lady had gone “Hulk, smash!” on the interior of the Dodge. The door whistled and leaked without its weather stripping ever after and once a repair guy questioned me whether those were blood stains on the handles of all the windows. I just told him he was better off not knowing.

Most endearing of Lady’s attributes was the way she took shepherding the children as a sacred duty. If my husband or I started to play with the children in any sort of wrestling way she’d stand and bark at us as if to say, “Enough of that rough house behavior, you behave yourselves!” She could be intimidating if she thought it was necessary, but more often she’d simply come and sit down beside your knees and put her long muzzle across them, patiently waiting for a walk, or a treat.

I was musing about that, staring ahead at the moon halfway up in the sky when I noticed Lady and I were casting a dark shadow that stretched ahead of us when it should have been behind us. I suddenly realized what the “flup-flup-flup” noise that had been steadily growing louder had to be. The shadow shrank towards me as the police helicopter skimming over my neighborhood climbed over my head. I hoped they were not videotaping their inspection of the neighborhoods. I’d hate to see the headlines, “Naked Woman Dances with Wolf,” or “Canine Cultist Moons the Moon.” I suppose they have seen stranger things and had more notorious criminals to apprehend. Once the helicopter was safely out of sight, I put down my fur coat and after a few stiff steps, she did her backyard business and then smelled her way back to me. She wagged her tail as I scratched behind her ear as if to say, “So why are we out here in the cold?”

The Funkiest Wedding

My boyfriend and I both believed that the only reason to wed was because you could love God and serve Him better together than you could apart. After a mini-soap-opera of a five-year courtship in which both sides of the family did not think we were good enough to graft into their branch of the family tree we were convinced it was God’s will that we marry. The families grudgingly resigned themselves to the fact that we were going to do this despite their disapproval. We set a date that gave us three months to pull a wedding together on what the bride and groom had in their savings and enlisted the help of our close friends. I delegated music, decorations, and key aspects of the ceremony to various people and concentrated on things that only I could do like fainting at my blood test for the marriage license.

Despite what the bride beautiful magazines tell you, a wedding ceremony is not about what the bride wants or even about having a “perfect day” of memories. A wedding is about taking two families of strangers and making them into one strange family. My beloved and I could have gone on a mountain top and said our vows before God and the arrangement would have been binding for us because we believe God is omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent. But we felt we had to have a wedding ceremony witnessed by our relatives so there could be no more suggestions that we try “dating somebody else.”

The difficulty was finding a neutral territory in which to have the ceremony. Our college church had met in the YMCA and our pastor wasn’t available for a month surrounding our wedding date. My mother-in-law’s church wouldn’t marry us because I was not Catholic. My family’s Methodism was the kind that didn’t have a home church. So we settled on an outdoor wedding in the back yard of my imminent in-laws. They obtained a little trellis arch and decorated it with silk flowers. My future father-in-law offered to make arrangements to have a new, young pastor from his church perform the ceremony. I had never been to his church – it had a really long name that ended with the word “wonders” – but I was relieved to have one less thing on my to do list.

It is only in the last century that we have grown dependent on weddings to economically sustain caterers, bakers, florists, confectioners, tuxedo rentals, bridal boutiques, and wedding consultants. I found out recently that it is considered bad luck to make your own wedding dress. I had sewn my share of nightgowns and for $50 of white satin and lace, I was able to sew my own wedding dress. I’ll admit, it looked somewhat like a nightgown, but at least there were no complicated fittings and my maid-of-honor could hand sew the hem as we drove to Grover City (later renamed Grover Beach). I bought a nice pair of high-heeled dance sandals. My mother had a silk flowered headdress made for me and since brides in other countries have had to wear far worse, I figured I could get through the ceremony without it toppling off my head. The groom and the best man would wear dark slacks and shoes and traditional Filipino wedding shirts made by the mother-of-the-groom.

Initially, I was just going to have cake and punch for the reception, but my future mother-in-law refused to have a “white people’s” reception for her only son. She and the aunties told me they would cook some decent Filipino food like lumpia, chicken adobo, and pansit, so “at least people could eat” and when word of this leaked out my side of the family volunteered to bring meat pasties and potluck salads. Since I like “naked” Angel Food cake with fresh strawberries, the maid of honor and I baked about six of them and chopped up the berries the night before.

By the morning of August 6, 1983, it had been discovered that the best man had forgotten his dress shoes and had only ratty sneakers to wear. I suggested he go barefoot since the whole thing would take place on the grass in the backyard. My friend in charge of decorations had strung white and pink crepe paper over every part of the patio, clothesline, and shrubbery she could reach. In the coastal air the crepe paper was already beginning to stretch so the patio looked like it had been TP’ed by pranksters. My friend had been drinking cola since breakfast and was looking a bit jittery so I told her she had achieved modern art without a government grant. I later found out she tied three dozen aluminum soda cans to our getaway truck. She also drew hearts in shaving crème over the vehicle which, because it sat out in the sun all afternoon, ate into the paint job so that a heart could be seen on the side of that truck for the next 17 years we owned it.

As we approached the time for getting dressed for the ceremony, my fiancé pulled me aside privately and said, “If you have any doubts about marrying me, this is your chicken exit. You can call it off right now. But if you vow to be my wife, and take me for your husband, it’s for life because divorce will not be an option. We may be happy or we may be miserable, but we will be together until we die.” I don’t remember exactly what I said, but it was something to the effect of “let’s do this.”

I was trying to pull together my whole hair and dress ensemble in my parents’ motorhome when my maid-of-honor came in and said soothingly, “We’ve had a slight miscommunication but things are going to be JUST FINE.” Turns out the young pastor my father-in-law had asked to perform the wedding had thought he was being invited to attend a wedding. I had thought it odd that there was no wedding rehearsal scheduled. Poor guy showed up just when the ceremony should have started only to be greeted by two really annoyed fathers. Fortunately, he lived a few blocks away so he raced home and got his “wedding gear” and raced back to do what the state of California had invested him with the power to do.

I told my musician friends, who often played at coffee houses in our college town, to choose something they knew we would like. I believe our processional was “When I’m Sixty-Four” by the Beatles and our recessional was “Crocodile Rock” by Elton John. Our maid-of-honor was the loveliest thing at the wedding in a rose gown she had chosen. She has a habit of giggling when she’s nervous. The audience kept wondering what joke they were missing as she walked up to her place. Our best man is very tall and very sentimental and as he took his place, there was much questioning among the relatives as to the significance of having the best man go barefoot. The groom was trying to look dignified while giving our names to the pastor. I was concentrating on not losing my headdress of flowers while gripping onto my father’s arm as my high heels snagged on the brick walkway and sunk into the lawn.

I made it to my beloved’s side, was given away by my father, and faced the pastor completely unsure of what would happen next. He threw back his head and flung his hands to the sky and cried out in a booming southern accent, “Praise God, Brothers and Sisters, for the GLORIOUS day HE has made and the bringing together of these two young people in that SACRED and HOLY institution of marriage, AMEN and HALLELUJAH.” I looked at my betrothed and he looked at me and we smiled. God had provided the perfect pastor who would make both sides of the family equally uncomfortable.

We loved everything the pastor had to say except for the fact that he kept getting my name wrong. My husband not only married Sandra Sue that day but Sharon, Susan, and Sally. This sent the maid of honor into suppressed fits of giggles. The best man began to weep and sniffle as large tears dropped off the end of his nose. My groom and I had our own distraction in the form of a fly that thought we looked good enough to eat. I made an effort to not swallow it as I was saying my part and at one point I wanted to reach out and smack it off my man’s mustache but decided the audience wasn’t going to understand a loving slap’s role in the ceremony anymore than they were following the preacher’s southern drawl.

Vows were vowed, rings exchanged, and we were pronounced man and wife. The traditional family photographs were taken. My family made a point of cutting off the best man’s bare feet in the photos they took. My in-laws made a point of including his feet but cutting off the best man’s head in every photo they took of the wedding party. One of our friends had made a lovely mix of wedding music that he played for our reception as both sides of the family endured the afternoon heat on their own sides of the patio and visited their own buffet tables of food. I was particularly proud of the fathers, who broke ranks and went to the opposite sides to fill their plates. My father picked up a piece of lumpia and stared at it. My father-in-law picked up a meat pasty and stared at it. Then they both took a bite and smiled at each other with recognition. Chopped meat and vegetables in a pastry – this they could appreciate!

My brother had been kind enough to play some of his bluegrass music for the reception and now with a piece of cake he came to sit beside me. My husband’s family was on one side of the patio, muttering. My family was huddled on the other side, murmuring. My brother said gently, “You were a flower girl at my first wedding so you remember how perfect it was. The church, the dress, the flowers, the ice sculpture at the reception – all just the way they were supposed to be. But ten years later the marriage failed. Based on what you’ve gone through today, you two must really love each other and I’m thinking your marriage will succeed.” I was too numb at the time to remember if I had a response, but I’ve often thought since about marital success being inversely proportional to the size of the wedding ice sculpture.

Our musicians were getting ready to leave and one of them came up to us with congratulatory hugs and said appreciatively, “I’ve done a lot of weddings but THIS was the FUNKIEST wedding I’ve ever seen.” Twenty-seven years and many weddings later I can say with confidence that mine was the funkiest wedding I have ever seen. But for all the quirks and mishaps of the wedding, the marriage has been glorious, delightful, and blessed. A wedding is just a day, a ceremony, a life-marker that announces, “from here on out, two lives become one.” It’s the marriage and the legacy it creates that matters in the grand scheme of life.

Alma

“I’ll go get Alma ready to receive a visitor,” the orderly said and left me in the hallway of the assisted living center for seniors. Looking around at the various old people inexplicably left in the hallway propped up in their walkers or parked in their wheelchairs I knew, as most of them did, that this wasn’t a center for living but rather one for dying. I was thirty years old, and nine months into a healthy pregnancy that had made my waist-length hair flourish into a shampoo-commercial mane of shiny locks. I stood there, the poster child for fecundity, listening to the grunts and squeaks as the residents sidled closer and closer to me. This always happened. No one said anything, but these souls trapped in withered bodies would crowd around me and silently reach out and touch my belly and smile. The new life I was carrying attracted them like moths to a flame.

“Y’all leave the nice church lady alone now!” the orderly said, shooing old people away like they were overly affectionate cats. To me he said, “Alma’s glad you’re here, you just go on in.” Alma had been some sort of civil service employee, married and divorced, and now in her old age she had no family left and only a few friends. Years ago she had smoked a pack of cigarettes a day and now she was dying of lung cancer. She had rediscovered a faith in God she had known as a child and a friend of hers had asked the church to send somebody who could talk to her about “heavenly things.” I was the trained Stephen Minister that had been assigned as Alma’s care giver.

At our first meeting she asked me, “Do you smoke? Have you ever smoked?” I shook my head, taking in the numerous tubes and the gurgling oxygen tank that was keeping Alma alive. “Don’t you ever take a single puff. That’s the message of my life. If you care about your friends and family, you make sure they never smoke. You tell anybody with a lit cigarette about me. I know everybody dies. But this –“ and she paused both to gesture to her tank and to struggle for breath, “is a horrible . . . way to . . . die.”

I visited Alma once a week for months. In a typical church body the demand for counsel and visitations exceeds what a pastor can keep up with so the Stephen Ministry program was created to train lay members of the church to assist people through the changes in life that create crises. I’d cared for people who had been injured or were recovering from a surgery, I’d visited families with a new baby trying to sort out what life was life without sleep, and I’d been there for people who were grieving the loss of a spouse or a child. Alma was my first assignment in “walking someone home.” There wasn’t anything I could do to make breathing any easier for her. I was just there for her to have someone to talk with about what really matters in life. We talked about God, and faith, and heaven. We talked about hopes and regrets. As the months passed, though, we seemed to talk more and more about the baby.

As Alma’s body trembled as she fought for oxygen between sentences, she would plot how I could bring the baby to see her. She didn’t want me to bring the baby “into a place like this.” But there was a little courtyard outside her room and she would get the orderly to unlock the gate. I could bring the baby up to the window. She would get the attendants to roll her bed up to the glass. We talked about baby names and Lamaze class and I showed her things that were going into the baby’s nursery. Our visits grew shorter because Alma would grow too fatigued to talk.

I went into labor on a Sunday night and by Monday morning I had delivered at the birthing center. My daughter was 7 pounds, 21 inches and “perfect” according to every criteria of infancy. I, however, had complications with the delivery and had it been a century or two earlier I would have probably died. Since it was 1990, I simply had to have outpatient surgery. It meant that my little family did not get home until mid-day Tuesday. My best friend was there to make sure mother and child were resting comfortably and when the doorbell rang she signed for the delivery. It was a beautiful flower and balloon arrangement in a little bassinet vase. I was surprised when the card said it was from Alma. How did she know the baby had been born? I had a phone number Alma had told me to call when the baby was born but up until now I had not had the chance. I did so to thank her for the flowers but was only able to leave a message on a machine.

The next day I got a call from Alma’s friend who had first referred her to our church. Because my husband had called the church to announce our daughter’s birth, the friend had found out I had delivered. Alma had passed away sometime between Sunday night and Monday morning but she had left money and instructions with her friend that when my baby was born, a gift would be sent in Alma’s name. I looked over at the bassinet and at the cat playing with the balloons and realized that Alma had taken her last breath around the same time my daughter had been struggling to take her first. I started to cry, realizing that I would not need to break into Alma’s courtyard in order for her to see the baby. In the twenty years since I knew Alma, I have tried to pass on her message: don’t smoke – ever.

What's with the pigs?

When someone comes into my house it doesn’t take long for them to ask, “Who’s the pig fanatic?” or “What’s with all the pigs?” I estimate that there’s 200 different pig-themed items around the house. I have pig-themed art, tools, books, clothing, kitchen utensils, mugs, table settings, banks, flower planters, wind-chimes, refrigerator magnets, and figurines. If you reach for a flashlight, it’s shaped like a pig. If you lift off the shower cap from the wall it was hanging on a pig head. I have pig slippers and a costume rubber pig nose. I have dozens of pig-themed bracelets and pins. I have pig-shaped corn cob holders. If you are in a public area of my house, there are pig things watching you.

I never intended to collect pigs. In my early teens my family went on a vacation to London. We visited the British Museum, we went to the tower of London, we watched the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace, but we also went to a county fair on the outskirts of the city. I loved the fair because it was so green, and the horses were so beautiful, and they had these pink piglets of the breed later featured in the movie “Babe.” These tiny porkers were reminiscent of my childhood favorites, Wilbur from “Charlotte’s Web” and Piglet from the “Winnie-the-Pooh” series. When we returned to California my brother asked me what I liked best about London. I mentioned that I liked the country fair and I showed him photographs of the pigs and he said sarcastically, “You went to London, England and what you liked were the pigs?!”

For my next birthday he gave me a pig candle with a card that said, “Since you like pigs so much!” There were about thirteen of my high school friends watching me open presents and read cards and they all burst out with, “Oh! You like pigs! You should have told us.” At my next birthday party, everything I got for a present was shaped like or decorated with pigs. The following Christmas, people had noticed I had a shelf of “pig things” and I started to get more presents for my “pig collection.” By the time I went to college, the collection was out of control and since I showed up in my dorm room with pig pens and a Miss Piggy calendar and a pig keychain, I had no hope of coming off as anything but a swinophile, an oinkologist, or a pigmaniac.

For a long time I wasn’t sure I wanted to be associated with a creature typically thought of as dirty, gluttonous, and destined for slaughter. But along with collecting pigs, I started to learn about them. Pigs are the fourth smartest non-human animals on earth after primates, dolphins, and elephants. Pigs can be obsessive about rooting things out using their extremely sensitive noses whether the object of their search is a truffle or a landmine. Pigs can swim. Pigs enjoy music. Pigs are curious and play with toys. Pigs are sensitive and expressive – if they’re happy their tails curl tight; if they are sad or sick, their tails go limp and straight. Pigs are typically covered with mud not because they lack a sense of hygiene but because they wallow in mud to cool their sensitive skin and protect themselves from parasites, much as we might slather on sunscreen or bug repellant. You cannot be “sweating like a pig” because pigs don’t sweat. Pigs, unlike a lot of animals, prefer to defecate away from where they eat and live. Pigs are omnivores but they do not overeat. They are simply “made to be meaty” when they are healthy. The more I knew about pigs, the more akin to them I felt.

But it was at the Kern County Fair one year that I truly bonded with the nature of swine. It was pig judging time and I was sitting in the stands watching 4-H kids move their hogs around before the judge. Vision and cooperation are not a hog’s strong points so to get the beasts to turn the swineherds had to use wide boards with a handle. The pig would plod along and then the youth would plant this board down directly in their path, and make a corner out of it with another board, putting up impassable walls in front of the boar or sow and leaving them only one direction to turn (swine do not go in reverse well). So, resignedly, the porcine creature would turn and waddle in the direction indicated, while its handler ran around it and set up the barriers to turn it in the next direction they wanted their prize porker to go. And then it dawned on me: that’s how God sometimes has to direct me. I get so fixated on going forward that the only way for Him to divert me in a different direction is to put up these barriers, these hardships, these disasters, these losses in my life so that when faced with “dead ends” ahead and to the side I blunder on in the only direction left open to me. I’m one of God’s pigs. Smart, social, curious but built for practicality, not for style. I require spiritual whacking with a cane (“thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me”) or “direction by limited options” to get me where God wants me to be.

Pig anatomy is similar to humans in the arrangement of their internal organs. Nearly every part of a pig can be used for some pharmaceutical purpose which is why we have pig insulin, pig thyroxin, and pig heart valves inside lots of humans today. Not to mention the delicious array of pork products (the other white meat) digesting inside a large portion of the population. I had the most delicious bacon-wrapped dates at my niece’s wedding and was told by the caterers they were called “baby fingers.” Is it any wonder that the oldest known domesticated farm animal was the pig?

What perversity on our part has allowed us to make the term “pig” an insult? Sir Winston Churchill once said, “I like pigs. Dogs look up to us. Cats look down on us. Pigs treat us as equals.” Harry Truman was quoted as saying, “No man should be allowed to be President who does not understand hogs.” So whether God knew I was a piggy at heart and allowed the pig collection to develop around me or whether being surrounded by pigs has influenced my approach to life is hard to say. But I do hope the Mama Pig Cookie Jar holding two piglets survives me. It’s where I’ve told the kids to stash my ashes.

My First Miracle

Our lives get bookmarked by our “firsts.” I remember my first day of school, my first romantic kiss, and my first job interview. I now know there were many miracles in my childhood but the first genuine miracle that I knew was for me, from God with my name on it, happened in late March of 1981 on the UC Santa Barbara campus. I was not yet 21 years old and I was not a believer in the existence of a personal God who cared about the piddling details of human lives. This was not a problem for God.

My problem was so small, so inconsequential to the grand scheme of human achievement, and so trivial that I’m now embarrassed I cared so passionately about it. I wanted to take a Film Studies class on Movie Musicals that was only taught once every four years. I was already in my junior year and this would be my only chance. I had followed protocol and gone with my boy friend and my roommate to sign up for the class. This was in the day when to register for a class you picked up from the instructor a computer punch card created for that class and that class alone. You then took your collected “hand” of computer cards to the registrar’s office and had them filed with an identity card issued to you and it was all fed into the computer so that it would show you were officially registered for that class. If you didn’t file the card, you didn’t get credit for the class. Because the movie musicals class was so popular, if you weren’t taking it for credit, you could not just audit the class. I had been so pleased to accept that class card from the instructor and place it with the rest of my class load. I was on my way to file my cards when I read in the small print at the top of the card that I had been handed the card for the other class the professor taught, Films of Ingmar Bergen, not the card for Movie Musicals.

I did not want to spend a trimester watching black and white movies about death, illness, betrayal and insanity, but I felt like I was on the verge of all those things. I had done everything right, and by sheer inattentiveness on my professor’s part, I was going to be excluded from watching with my friends big splashy Technicolor musicals where people were singing and dancing and things always worked out right in the end. As my boyfriend and I made our way across campus to throw myself at the mercy of the Film Department and beg for another class card, I was filled with rage at the universe and just about to overflow with hot, salty tears.

My boyfriend stopped me in the middle of a major walkway with hundreds of students moving past us and said, “I think we should pray about this. May I pray for you that God work this out?” I’d been dating this guy, in an off-again, on-again fashion for three years. The off-again was mostly due to the fact that he believed God listened to him when he prayed, which my boyfriend did often, out loud, and in public. At this point I was accepting it as one of his “quirks”. Besides, I knew there was no way I was going to get a class card since I had seen the professor give the last one out and turn away a long line of people who wanted a card and were denied. “Fine, go ahead and pray,” I told him.

He took my hand, closed his eyes, and then got that serenely delighted look on his face he would get and addressed the clear blue Santa Barbara sky with its puffy white clouds. I don’t remember the exact words because I was too busy thinking that if there was a God and he cared a rat’s tail about me then I wouldn’t have gotten the ticket to cinematic hell in the first place. But I know that my boyfriend stated, as naturally as if he was explaining to someone standing right beside us, my predicament, and that he asked that I get the class card and be in the class with him and that we needed a miracle for that to happen. Amen.

With only a couple of hours left to file my class cards for the next semester, we showed up at the Film Studies office. There were only two teacher aide types working in the office and I earnestly explained my problem. The young ladies agreed that I had a problem. “I’m really sorry for you,” one gal explained, “but there are an exact amount of cards for that class printed and we can’t make more or change that one you have to a different class.”
“Maybe somebody decided they didn’t want the class and turned a card back in?” my boyfriend suggested.

They laughed. The class was popular enough you could make money on an unwanted class card.
“I’m sorry, there’s really nothing we can do,” said the girl at the counter sincerely.
“Of course,” said the girl at the desk slowly, “there was that envelope that was dropped off.”
“What envelope?” asked her co-worker.
“You know, the envelope that was brought in just a little while ago.”
“Who brought it?”
“I didn’t know him. I couldn’t even tell you what he looked like, ‘cept he was big. It’s that white envelope sitting at the end of the counter. I didn’t look to see what was in it yet.”

The Film Studies secretary walked to the end of the counter, riffled through some mail and came back to us holding a plain, unaddressed business envelope. She broke the seal and gently pulled out a single class card. “It don’t believe it! This is amazing.” She had the other office employee come and verify it and they joyfully traded me a computer card with Movie Musicals typed on its edge for the Bergman Films card I had. Somewhat in shock and awe, I thanked them and my boyfriend and I left and went to where you filed your class list. After hugging and dancing me about while thanking God, my boyfriend just walked along smiling like a man whose team had won. But while I’m going through the motions of the registration process, while I’m walking back to the dining commons, while I’m having dinner, while I’m telling the story to my roommate, and while I’m going about the business of life in the dormitory there was a part of my brain that could not categorize what happened.

Was it coincidence? That’s what I wanted to believe but the odds were so against a card being turned in, and just dropped off in a blank envelope, with no explanation. Those women would have remembered a film student saying, “Hey, I’ve got a hot class card here, what will you give me for it?” Why couldn’t they remember or describe the person who had dropped it off? Why hadn’t they asked questions or looked inside the envelope earlier? And what was the connection between my boyfriend earnestly asking that I miraculously get placed in the class, for no other reason than that I wanted it, and the grand coincidence happening. He had believed if he asked that God was capable of doing something. He didn’t instruct God on what to do; he just asked that it be done, in the tone of voice you’d ask a loving parent, “Fix it, please?”

That’s when a huge rip was made in the veil that covered my thinking about God. It would take days, nearly a couple of weeks, before I stepped through that opening and discovered the reality of faith and grace and the Living God. But this was my “there’s more to heaven and earth than is dreamt of in your philosophy” moment. What if there was a God that answered prayer, not because it mattered to the grand scheme of the cosmos, but because it mattered to those who loved Him, and in answering He showed His love for them? It had taken the courage of conviction for my boyfriend to pray aloud in front of me, with all my negativity and doubt, and involve God in the drama of my selfish life. What if prayer and what we called coincidence were somehow connected? What if this give and take between something we called God and something we called “real life” happened all the time around us and we weren’t paying attention? What if God was trying to show me something and this was the only way of getting my attention? What if when things didn’t happen, it was because no one had bothered to pray?

Disneyland Now

When I had children of my own I lived only three hours away from the Magic Kingdom – a fact that I did not want them aware of as they watched Disney videos and an actual Disney channel. So when they’d ask, “Can we go to Disneyland?” I’d take them to the Disney Store in the mall. The toys, clothing and videos available at a Disney store was enough stimulation for any preschooler and all mine knew about the land of Disney. I never told them it was Disneyland -- I just never told them there was anything else.

Disneyland should not be seen from the viewpoint of a stroller. Regardless of how tall you must be to ride this ride, in my kingdom you have to be at least five years old to be worth the price of admission to Walt’s world. When my daughter turned five we left her one-year-old brother with the best kind of friends and told her we were going on a vacation to a hotel with a pool. This hotel was within walking distance of the famed amusement park and as we went out for a stroll I pointed out the snow-capped mountain and discussed with her how odd it was to see such a thing in Southern California in late May. By the time we had reached the entrance she had figured out where she was and was appropriately thrilled. We were celebrating her birthday and she assumed the parades and fireworks had been arranged just for her. She loved everything about Disneyland – except the costumed characters. Characters in costumes whose human faces showed were fine, but my daughter was too smart to believe mice and ducks and dogs should be parading around at such abnormal sizes. She liked her animated characters in two dimensions, thank you.

When it was my son’s turn for the five-year-old initiation to Disneyland I was so proud of his sister. At nine she was adept at pointing out to her brother, “Hey, look over there. A mountain with snow on it! What’s that doing in the middle of a city in California?” Her brother fell for it hook, line, and sinker. We bought our tickets and entered into Disneyland and I told my son I’d take a picture of him in front of the Mickey Mouse Flower Display. “That way we’ll have a record of your visit to Disneyland.” He posed for the picture then looked at the wall of flowers and sighed, “This is the happiest day of my life. Thank you for bringing me to Disneyland. I always wanted to see this.” As he kept gazing fondly at the flowers, I leaned down and said, “You know, son, there’s more than just flowers at Disneyland.” His eyes got big, “There IS?” The whole family could barely contain themselves. “This is just the entrance. If we go around through that tunnel, there’s more to see.” He was agog, and murmured, “Better than this?” You never met a more appreciative child. The look of absolute awe as he surveyed the wonders of Disneyland should have been in a travel brochure for a Disney resort vacation.

Chip and Dale came strolling up and his sister began, “Now you don’t need to be nervous about the characters, they’re just . . . “ but it was too late. My son flung himself in adoration upon the costumed characters and begged to have his photograph taken with them. He was fearless when it came to spinning things and creepy situations. I have since come to realize that the world as he sees it is rather like Disneyland which may explain why he was completely at home there.

In a world of amusement parks, one of the things that makes Disneyland stand above the rest is how it treats those “less able” with respect. If your size, age, physical or mental capabilities are not up to a statistical norm, Disneyland is still accessible and enjoyable. We got to experience Disneyland from the “wheelchair” view when the Aunties met us there to enjoy it with the children. Because one of the aunties is in an electric wheelchair, we suddenly learned that there are entire boats at It’s a Small World for wheelchairs and special entrances to everything for wheelchairs. If one of your party has special needs, the whole group gets to move up to the special needs entrance, no waiting in those pesky lines. You have automatic front row seating (if you don’t mind having children on your lap and feet) for the parades. But most importantly, you are spoken to and dealt with as a human being of worth by the Disney personnel.

This brings me to what truly makes Disneyland one of the happiest places on earth: the employees. The hiring standards are strict and extraordinary because I have chatted with the lady who sweeps up every speck of trash to the ride attendants to the store operators and I have never been treated rudely or coarsely. On our most recent trip to Disneyland we spoke with Carly, an intern with Disney University, who sincerely testified that Disneyland is the best place to work and that she loves the people who work with her, the guests who come to visit and the vision of Walt Disney. She was talking to us while waiting at a bus stop outside the park after the park had closed. No one was around to make her say what she did, this was someone who truly believes in Disneyland and had traveled from out of state to spend her days there.

I wasn’t sure Disneyland would still appeal to my children now that they have reached the ages of sixteen and twenty. But this is the genius behind the place’s design – whatever age you are there is something that will appeal to you. It was rewarding to see that my children are now able to not only enjoy the Indiana Jones adventure but to equally enjoy the stage shows and the landscaping and the engineering behind keeping so many people content in such a small area. They loved discovering live ducklings on the Jungle cruise growing up next to the animatronic apes. They were moved by Moments with Mr. Lincoln. They respected what Walt was trying to do, basing main street on an idealization of his home town, and they appreciated that there should be a place where a family could just play without the real world cares intruding. They could see how the illusion worked – but they enjoyed it anyway.

Disneyland truly is a small world after all. Family groups from all walks of life mutually undergo the sticker shock treatment of paying for admission and then docilely exhibit peace on earth, good will towards all by standing without complaint in lines, and following directions as they are loaded on and off the various conveyances. You will see the most frightening biker dude covered with tattoos and rippling with muscles, holding a fairy wand and a princess hat while his little girl waves at him from the carousel. You can sit at any restaurant and close your eyes and listen to families chatting in every language and know what they’re saying without knowing their dialect. You can park Grandpa with his walker and Grandma with her oxygen in New Orleans square and they are entranced just to people watch and share an ice cream bar in the shape of Mickey Mouse ears. And as for me, you can just leave me on the Pirates of the Caribbean ride – I keep expecting to find a ride I enjoy better and every time, that’s the one that thoroughly satisfies. I’ve got my Pirate Mickey souvenir tee shirt to prove it.