Birthing Babies and Celebrating the God Who is Present

I had the ecstatic pleasure and fearsome opportunity 28 to years ago deliver my son, Josh. Narcie had been born two years earlier, in 17 minutes in the wrong hospital. Cindy is quick on delivery! We wouldn't make it to the hospital 40 miles away so Narcie was born in the old Chesterfield General Hospital in Cheraw, SC - no OB doctor there, they had to call in a local General Practitioner. I was in a gown before he was. Then two years later, the day after I had finished reading an emergency child birth book, I came in from visiting church members and Cindy said, "I think this is it!"

Narcie was asleep in her room. I called the designated friend who was going to watch her while we went the needed 40 miles. But once again we didn't make it. We didn't even get out of the bathroom. The friend helped ease Cindy up, and I got on the business end. Then Josh, Mr. Torpedo Head, started crowning. Thank God for the book and having been raised in an agricultural context ( won't say any more), I prayed, yelled, panicked, but did what I really supposed to do: turn him, ease him out, then grabbed an ear-bulb syringe from the medicine cabinet and suctioned Josh's nose and mouth and he started breathing and crying. Whew! It was also a good thing I had just finished painting the bathroom just a few days before, not having any idea it was going to become a delivery room! God is sooooo... Good! Then I called the Rescue Squad. They came and cut the cord, and I went outside and tossed my cookies. Cindy was great and the rest is almost history.

I say "almost" because now the circle comes back around. Josh's dear wife, Karen, turned 26 today, February 23 and Josh turns 28 this Friday, February 25, and, guess what, she's pregnant, expecting a granddaughter at the end of March. I hope all goes well for her and the precious K.L.M. Baby Girl they are going to have. We have no idea what the initials stand for, but that's better than okay.  Karen is such a wonderful person! She just finished up her second undergraduate degree - this one a B.S.N and she passed the NCLEX exam last week so now she's a R.N., registered nurse. Most of you know that Josh, like his sister is United Methodist Clergy. He gets ordained an Elder, like his sister, this summer at Annual Conference. Anyway, best wishes to Josh and Karen on their birthdays, and K.L.M. as her arrival looms.

I am so thankful for all 3 of our children: Narcie, Josh, and Caleb. Caleb, by the way, was born at the new Cheraw hospital. It's hard to imagine in a small 1500 population like Cheraw, SC that all 3 of our children were born there and in 3 different places! God bless Cheraw and all of our dear church members there. We ended up moving away from my initial 3-point charge and spent 9 years in 26-miles-away-Hartsville, SC, but then we were sent back to First UMC, Cheraw for a four-year-stint. The doctor who delivered Narcie, Dr. Jim Thrailkill, was a wonderful parishioner, God rest his soul.

The point of all this isn't to do a weird Birthday Greeting to our kids and soon-to-be-born granddaughter. I'm just reminded on this day between Josh and Karen's birthdays that God's providence and love are an ever present help no matter the situation. There's plenty of junk to go around in this sin-marred world. I am thankful to God for the goodness that's left and how Jesus redeems it all if we let Him. So, in the midst of the continuation of Narcie's brain tumor saga, and all the other stuff that makes every day a challenge - today I am grateful for the personal epiphanies that I have seen with my own eyes: 3 children, 2 great children-in-law, 2 grandchildren and #3 on the way, a wonderfully patient wife, and a host of people who day in-day out reflect a real relationship with Jesus Christ, the Hope of Glory. Yes, indeed, I have beheld His glory.

John Wesley, United Methodists, and Me on Love

Valentine’s Day may be almost a week past but love’s importance is forever. I have been reading a lot in preparation for my weekly lectures at Lutheran Theological Southern Seminary. I’m in my 4th week of teaching “UMC History.” It has been a great refresher and good experience. This week I have been especially taken with all the dalliances that John Wesley had with women. This was a guy who said as a young man he probably wouldn’t marry because he wouldn’t be able to find someone like his mother. Ah, “Mother” issues. Well, we all know the story of Sophy Hopkey in Georgia and how that got Wesley in trouble with a grand jury and on a boat back to England.

Interesting, too, how all of the people in his society/class meeting in Georgia were female teenagers at least 10-15 years his junior – sounds like a “safe sanctuary” problem to me. Then shortly after Charles gets married in the early 1740’s, Wesley is nursed back to health after an illness by Grace Murray, a serving girl 15 years his younger. Brother Charles is so upset at the differences in stations in life that he hijacks the woman and marries off to one of Wesley’s preachers. By all accounts she would have been a great partner in both family and faith! Wesley was very close to lots of women in the Wesleyan Revival. Some of his contemporaries even suggested that this was because women had the spiritual disposition to grasp his “practical divinity” and “holiness of heart and life” better than men. This assessment must have been pretty true. Wesley wrote pseudo-love letters about God to lots of women, many, no doubt, who became enamored with God and/or Wesley.

But then, 15 months after the famous Grace Murray incident, Wesley fell on some ice on London Bridge and was nursed back to health in the home of a wealthy widow, Mary “Molly” Vazeille. In two week’s time, in 1751 at age 48, John Wesley is married and Charles is too late to stop it. Like Grace Murray, Charles thinks this marriage will derail the revival. It almost does. There seemed to be maybe 6 good years of marriage then the toll of Wesley’s travels and the issue of female soul-mates and the letters to prove it became the undoing of their marriage. They separate off-and-on for the rest of their marriage. They exchanged heated words, letters, and plenty of triangulation with other people about “She said-he said” evidence surrounding John’s relationships with women leaders in the revival. Molly Wesley, some would say, actually helped the revival and kept Wesley on the preaching circuit so he wouldn’t have to go home. When he was away she compulsively tore into his desk looking for evidence in his letters or journals of his moral failings. Nevertheless, he finally told her he would come home if she would, “Suspect me no more; asperse me no more; provoke me no more. Do not any longer contend for mastery, for power, money, or praise…” After 30 years of fitful marriage she dies October 8, 1781. Wesley was away from London, returning the day of her burial, but was not informed of it until 2 days later. Wow, and how sad.

Some of Mary Wesley’s actions remind me of a speaker at a woman’s club who was lecturing on marriage and asked the audience how many of them wanted to “mother” their husbands. One member in the back row raised her hand. “You mean you really want to mother your husband?” the speaker asked. “Mother?” the woman said. “I thought you said ‘smother.’”

In a true marriage smothering doesn’t take place, by either person. There is a free mutuality of purpose and a partnership of respect. Unfortunately John Wesley never experienced married bliss. I’m not saying it was Molly’s fault. Wesley had plenty of issues and would have been a therapist’s nightmare concerning intimacy and love. On loving God and others he was great! Unfortunately, like many of us in the church today, we can love everybody and not be intimate with anybody. We can more easily bless people from a distance by a donation or a check than by our close involvement, especially if they’re different from us. We’re good on paper like Wesley, and, like him, we’re good with friends and strangers. It’s the people we live with that know the truth about us. They have seen the pretense disintegrate and fall to the floor. A man asked his children one day why people thought he was a Christian. Their hasty response was, “Maybe because they don’t know you!” I pray that people will know us and our true personal love. I hope that we United Methodists will love people, really love people – not by giving a donation but by giving ourselves.

Happy Valentine's Day to Gabby Gifford, Mark Kelly and the Rest of Us

I’m thinking about Congresswoman Gabby Giffords’ and her husband Mark Kelly’s marriage as Valentine’s Day approaches and the O. Henry-esque “Gift of the Magi” decision that they are making about his Space Shuttle flight. I’m wishing them both Godspeed along with every couple across the world who have been through life’s gauntlet. With Cindy’s recent surgery and Narcie’s continuing saga I know that I’ve seen great love from my son-in-law Mike and I hope I’ve been an okay nurse to my dear wife. Here’s wishing a safe flight to Mark Kelly and Rep. Giffords.


Every disaster connects us, doesn’t it? For instance, cross my fingers, the Space Shuttle “Columbia” disaster contained a lesson for all humanity. There were Americans on board, of course, but there were also connections to India and Israel. Diversity in race and gender was also present. Space exploration has been a great human leveler. It combats our xenophobic national pride and from the vantage point of space we embrace the whole planet.

Astronaut Sultan Bin Salman al-Saud from Saudi Arabia once said after a shuttle trip: “The first day or so we all pointed to our countries. The third or fourth day we were pointing to our continents. By the fifth day we were aware of only one Earth.” The losses of seven souls on February 1 were not just American, Indian, or Israeli, but a diminishment of all humankind.

John Donne of England said it well, however antiquated, “No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friends or of thine own were; any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”

In every death, whether of innocence or life, the ripple effect amplifies the tragedy to universal proportions. This is what makes Adam and Eve’s actions in the Garden speak for all humankind and perpetuate self-will over God’s will. Original Sin may explain our human condition en masse, but it also finds its proof in the everyday actions of you and me. Is there anything original about Original Sin anymore? Each of us has done our voluntary part to carry on the bent to sinning with which we were born.

But, just as there has been a ripple effect of sin, there is the ripple effect of love. St. Paul said it something like this in Romans: Through one man Adam sin entered the world; through one man Jesus Christ comes grace. The ever-expanding example of love begun in Jesus reflects God’s best hope for humanity. In Jesus we see the victory of selflessness over selfishness.

The crew of the Columbia exhibited this same selflessness. Every journey into space is a selfless cry for a cosmic view of humanity. By its very nature, space exploration should imply an effort to better all people. From space we get a God’s-eye view of the world that comes closest to God’s own motivation to leave behind the safe confines of eternity and become bound by time and space in incarnation. In the selfless sacrifice and risk-taking of the shuttle crew we glimpse the God-like motivation to lay aside personal gain for the good of all.

James Gillespie Magee aptly describes this selfless heavenly vantage point:

“Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of earth

And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;

Sunward I've climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth

Of sun-split clouds - and done a hundred things

You have not dreamed of - wheeled and soared and swung

High in the sunlit silence. Hov'ring there

I've chased the shouting wind along, and flung

My eager craft through footless halls of air.

Up, up the long delirious, burning blue,

I've topped the windswept heights with easy grace

Where never lark, or even eagle flew –

And, while with silent lifting mind I've trod

The high unsurpassed sanctity of space,

Put out my hand and touched the face of God.”