Two Eyes and Dads

“I am not ashamed of the good news . . .” Romans 1:16

In the fourth grade kids called me, “Four eyes.” Taunts and other words shamed me, but that was decades ago. I didn’t undergo Lasik and PRK surgery on my eyes because I was ashamed of being seen in glasses.

“PRK permanently changes the shape of the cornea...” the first page of the eye’s surgeon’s consent form informed me. Before I turned each page my pen initialed and set the date once read, noting each risk that may come to my left eye. I had already signed the Lasik consent forms for my easy right eye. In a laser precise minute each fuzzy perceptor will be cut to high definition. There are no guarantees.There is every hope that my sight through eyeglasses will cease. But there is that risk my eyesight may fail in either eye.Funny, yours truly worry-wart, doesn’t fret the risks. My Heavenly Father gave me an earthly father to ready me for this time.

“Gals (pronounced with a hard g and els)!” he called my five sisters and I. Around six o’clock on Saturday he’d shout and flip the reel-to reel tape player to blast fine Glenn Miller swing. He had to wake us up of course, as it was morning. Mom was resting after a night nurse shift. We’d find Daddy in the kitchen cooking up food for breakfast and chicken for the weekend drive. This was before McDonalds dotted the highways and byways. And since Mommy couldn’t drive he was our chauffeur steering a hefty station wagon.

Daddy drove us to stores. He drove us to church. I remember day trips around the City by the Bay, trips to new houses subdivisions, and trips to orchards ripe for the picking. I cringed over summer trips back and forth to the Windy City where Mom and he began our family of gels.

Once he drove his friends on a long distance business trip to Arizona. There in a desert ditch, trooper found his friends and then found Daddy between the wheel and the windshield, alive by God’s grace.

The windshield tore half of his rugged face and half of his vision. Despite the prosthetic eye and the scar that reattached his cheek to his face, handsome Daddy still had half his face to smile and dimple. When he took us on a last stroll downtown before that last night I was with him, I was not ashamed to walk beside him. Though he had not shaved, nor was he in his typical white dress shirt with cuff links.

I knew my daddy’s love for me. If he could manage to live with one seeing eye, then I can too.

I expect I will, in a few months, see clearly through both eyes. I more eagerly wait to see with newer, perfected eyes when I get to heaven, where the Heavenly Father will embrace me and grant me the joy of walking and eating with my Daddy again.

Though celebrities and pundits may mock my faith, I will publicly walk with my Father and be labeled as his girl in Jesus.

For His perfect love drives me where I need to be.

Dancing With The Stars and Other Elections

If you watched Dancing With the Stars for a few seasons, like our family now does, you know the tango and the mambo are in the Latin category. Yet you learn each dance has distinctive steps and emotional mindsets the dancers must adapt with finesse to win over the judges and the discerning audience’s votes.

This season my initial favorite star was actress Cloris Leachman, but football pro, Warren Carlos Sapp toes lightly for his 300 lb. stature.

More folks viewed the first presidential debate than Dancing with the Stars. Good.

When I think of the upcoming Election Day, I pray glitz and glittering mendacities of politicians yield to thoughtful substance. If you are a voting citizen, do know the distinctive achievements each candidate brings to the table? What has each candidate executed or voted to legislate? Have you researched and can you quote their core convictions?

Researchers at Princeton University have found that people take just a tenth of a second to make character judgments about the people they meet. How shallow we are post-Eden. Let's allow ourselves more study time before we characterize the candidates and cast our votes in the November election.

****

My beloved expected a November trip to finalize a project, but during his October Texas trip, an email moved that trip to a few days after returning to our new Deep South home. The rush of back-to-back separations could have destroyed our times together. Instead, we had to dance the difficult quickstep. God’s grace held tension at bay by teaching us the new dance given us this life stage.

This new dance began when my beloved had to move deep South by himself and return home a few days of each month. We had to learn ways to rearrange roles in the dance. I led the family and the home for the most part, and then I had to relinquish the lead quickly for a weekend. Connects and disconnects sputtered and failed at times, as if we had lost cellular call space.

During nightly calls via speaker phones, we each had to learn the measured rhythm of polite conversation. If you know anything about speaker settings, any sound in the area of one phone caller can cut off the audio on the other phone. It can, in short, interrupt a person’s statement, as my beloved will say I often do. I’m impelled to fill in the blanks flow creative endings--not a good idea, unless you are in a room full of women.

Disruptors can sour discussion between spouses, between questions and redirects lead to opined judgments based on self-analysis which acts like salt to gnaw open, old wounds, emotions erupt. Then the static of verbal noise led to tears for one and silence for the other. Not good.

This husband/wife dance of dialogue improves with forgiveness and practice. May all our dialogue dances improve with humility and candid truth, even the political ones. Our attempts will not be perfect spot on seventy times seven, but we trust Him who continually forgives to sets us right.

***

Then Peter came to Jesus and asked, "Lord, how many times shall I forgive my brother
when he sins against me? Up to seven times?"
Jesus answered, "I tell you, not seven times, but seventy-seven times." (Mt 18:21-22,niv)

Curlz, Cuts by Us, & Other Connects
Part 2

(Me, Counselor Pal, and My Maria)

What percentage of scalp hair needs to turn gray
before hair consultants consider hair gray?

a. 75%
b. 80% or more
c. About 50%
d. 27.99%.

My beloved had his first gray strand at the tender age of 18. Decades later a full crown of gray settles on him. Aging locks enhance men's looks, through my fuzzy eyed perspective. But that perspective will soon change --as did my perspective on my few, gray locks.

"You're not gray," Susan, Curlz owner/ hair consultant assured me. Like any other military wife I'd met, she quickly rooted to wherever deployment sent her family. She was also quick to connect and quick to get down to others needs.

She needed my business; I needed to meet her. But in her tiny, non-franchised salon I again felt permission to breath as she sat face-to-face with me..

Over page flips of stylist books, we chatted. Finally she asked, "How fast does your hair grow? When's the last time you dyed it?"

Time for me is like counting to my special needs Buddy--not certain. A "humidity barometer," my hair frizzes, splits, and twirls whatever way it pleases until it grows too hideous to handle. I needed my beloved hubby to nudge me into this hair appointment, more a double-beloved nudge to another divine connect.

A counselor pal says, "A women's mind is like a pantry. Open it with a word or a phrase, and a memory comes off the shelf." Do you agree? When Sue and I talked, our pantries flew open to the same -labeled shelf: children with needs. From her came the encouragement I needed to hear about Vocational Rehab services in Georgia.

This morning I spoke with DDMR about Buddy. His case I'm told, awaits final approval for Georgia's version of a counselor and funds, funds dried up three months into the state fiscal year. Time to join the global panic?

Pension funds shrivel, stocks dive 37 percent, small business and big businesses have every reason to cringe as customers cocoon. Gray hairs, gray days happen. We turn to self-help books and life coaches or consultants for advice. Yet you and I have to do all the work or thinking. Mantras and rules from self-help bestselling personalities can't erase the gloom nor can they pacify in the panic.

Midnight found me seated on my sofa, seemingly alone, in a panic about the future. From the bestseller of all time I caught one word: PRAY. Realities didn't change. Reasons for panic didn't vanish. Peace cradled me as I talked and listened . . . not alone, but face-to-face with the Counselor deployed for me, quick to listen, quick to reconnect, and quick to serve my real needs at the right time.

Are you trying to get yourself out of a panic? Need counseling? Crease your knees right now. Have it out with the best Counselor, sent for you, quick to listen, reconnect, and meet your true needs, unhurried in eternity's timing.