Paradox, Romans 8, and Horseradish Slaw

Today was one of my best days, after a week that may have been one of the worst. There were many highlights. The morning started with a good cup of coffee. At lunch I enjoyed some of the best barbeque in Western Missouri. It was accented by a cup of savory horseradish slaw.  A little later I got to ride on a mower for a while, taking in some  belated scents of Spring. The day ended with a bit of a walk and a bit of a jog while my daughter rode along side me on her bike. It was epic stuff.

As the day draws to a close, the word that sticks with me though is paradox. We're all a bit paradoxical. I perhaps more than most. I love the State of Missouri and consider myself a Missourian through-and-through. But I went to graduate school at Kansas, taught there for a while, and somehow raised a bunch of rabid Jayhawk basketball fans. The two make odd cultural bedfellows, but somehow that combination has worked, although I would hardly say it defines me.

So after my morning cup of Joe, I loaded up my family--at least those still at home--and headed south to Osceola, Mo. We traveled much of the same route that William Lane's Jayhawkers traveled some 150 years ago when the sacked the rebel stronghold of Osceola. That September, 1861 evening of plunder and destruction and execution still rubs raw on some folks in these parts. It's strange to have roots in both places.

But our travels today were much nobler and less political. We visited the First Baptist Church of Osceola where our son Davis had been asked to preach as part of a preaching symposium sponsored by his church--Freshwater--in Bolivar, Mo.

It was a proud day for Sandee and me, and in the midst of Davis's outstanding sermon I was struck with another paradox of sorts. The son that I had taught was now teaching me. It was a powerful realization, that God had worked with what we had done, or more accurately worked in spite of it, and had grown Davis up into a man that could, and would, rightly divide the Word of Truth. Sandee and I had taught him to read, to tie his shoes, to ride a bike, to swing a golf club, and even some things of God, but here he was giving us new insight into the Apostle Paul's Letter to the Romans. It was a day that parents can only dream of when they're changing diapers and cleaning highchairs and administering timeouts or groundings and all the other things that in their midst seem like they will never matter.

But in a day of paradoxes, Davis confronted us with the ultimate paradox. He showed us anew that for us to be exalted, Another had to be humbled. He showed us that the road to Glory is paved with suffering. He showed us that perfect justice has its companion in grace. And he showed us that in breaking the chains of the law, Christ set us free to the law of the Spirit of life.

Paradox, Romans 8, and horseradish slaw. It was a great day. Perhaps the best.

Aunt Fredia

The Finley Children, Circa 1948.
L-R Melvin, Leta (Buck),
Fredia (Buck) & Gerald

She was a product of the Greatest Generation. And she was one of my final links to a world where things simply seemed to make more sense. Her lineage boasted Londoners and Kentuckians, both of whom eventually migrated to the lush, rolling terrain of the Osage River Valley in Western Missouri. She was my father's younger sister, and together they, with another older brother and another even younger sister, trickled into the world as Finleys during a nine year span that bridged World War I to the Roaring Twenties.

She and her three siblings came of age during the Great Depression, where the devastating economic consequences were real and realized, and not buoyed by artificial credit or fiat currency. Her father made a living in any way that would allow him to put food on the table. He sold bulk oils for Standard, started a trucking company, and owned a filling station--fixing flat tires that were casualties of the graveled Jefferson Highway. Later, when the Jefferson Highway was paved and became U.S. 71, her father let her sister and her roller skate out on the fresh hard-surfaced pavement, the only such surface to be found in the entire community.

Her father was a hard worker and a bit of an entrepreneur, but more than anything he just persevered. He and his family not only weathered the Great Depression from without, but also foes like tuberculosis from within. He and his resolute wife produced a powerful progeny, full of diligence, industry, loyalty, and grace.

My aunts, my uncle, and my father could barely find a place to hang their high school diplomas before being thrust into the vortex of the global strife brought on by World War II. Dad was shipped overseas-to Okinawa, to Leyte, to the Philippines. My uncle to San Diego, to protect us stateside.

By the start of the War both my aunts had married. The Finley sisters would marry a couple of brothers by the name of Buck. Thereafter, both would enjoy a sister-in-law who was also a sister. While the Finley and Buck men were placed in harm's way, the women stayed behind to engage in perhaps the tougher battle: to wait. To hold down the fort. To plant victory gardens or work in aircraft plants. To put their lives on hold while the world was on hold, and all-the-while wondering whether the loves of their lives would ever return.

God saw fit to bring the men back home, and they, like millions like them, all fairly promptly got to the business of baby booming. They basked in the new found hope and certainty that had alluded them in their youth.

By the time I came along, some 15 or so years later, they had established their lives and were enjoying a modest yet abundantly joyful Americana. My uncle by then had moved to California, but both my aunts had settled with the Buck men less than ten miles from our home. If I roll a highlight reel of childhood memories, my aunts a uncles are found throughout. Homemade ice cream...trout fishing trips...playing Pit by a campfire...blueberry pancakes...potato salad...fireworks extravaganzas...Nebraska-Oklahoma Thanksgiving Day football...popcorn balls...Easter Egg hunts...a hot cup of coffee from a styrofoam cup.

But as I grew older they grew old. My father's brother died in 1990. Uncle Lloyd Buck died in 1992; Uncle Willard Buck just 15 months later. But then there was a long period, maybe 15 years, where they--my father and my mother and my two aunts--grew even older together.

But in this fallen world death cannot be held long at bay. Aunt Leta, my father's youngest sister, died in late 2007. My mother followed her some eight months later.

Before my mother died she left us a little bit at a time as Alzheimer's disease compromised her faculties. She lived four years while dying a little bit each day. The long goodbye as some call it.

The effects of my mother's illness on my father were tremendous. But God had put someone on the earth with him some 85 years previous that He knew would help him when he faced one of his darkest times. That same little sister that he had maybe walked to first grade or looked after at the school dance would now look after him a bit.

My aunt Fredia took note that my father probably wasn't eating as well as he had been used to. She also noticed that there might have been a wrinkle or two in his clothes. So, she started making little Parkay cups of chili for placement in my father's deep freeze. She started taking in his shirts for ironing. And she would make the best lemon meringue pies known to man along with other baked goods to indulge my father's sweet tooth.

To Aunt Fredia I'm sure this was no big deal. And maybe any of us would've done that. But I don't think so. The love she had for my father and the bond they shared was forged in the unsettling times of the Great Depression and of the Great War. They had experienced a great deal together, and they would see each other through to the end.

My cousins buried my Aunt Fredia today. At 92 years her body finally succumbed to complications from a stroke suffered six weeks ago. A day or two after Aunt Fredia had been taken to the hospital, I stopped by my dad's apartment to check on him. I peeked in his refrigerator and saw two lemon meringue pies. I asked him where he had gotten those to which he replied, "Fredia stopped by the other day and dropped them off for me." It was undoubtedly one of the final acts of kindness and care she was able to perform.

They say that when both your parents finally pass away you are orphaned. I haven't asked my father about this, but I wonder if that feeling is experienced more acutely once your last sibling dies. Whether that's true or not for him, he is now the final link to an era that begin almost a century ago. He must finish his journey somewhat alone, with us, who know or understand little from whence he came.

I would be committing a great crime here to suggest, as I did in my second sentence, that things no longer make sense in this world but they did in 1920. In reality, the made little sense then either. Things might have been simpler but order and equilibrium and "sense" cannot be found in this earthly realm during any era.

Sense is not made from a baby boom, or from an Interstate system, or from an economic recovery, or even from crushing an evil empire. Sense is made only in eternity, before the Savior's face, where He makes all things new.

I take great comfort knowing my Aunt Fredia, tonight, is experiencing true Sense, for the first time, face-to-face.