more normal than not

I have an audio version of the Bible that I’ve started listening to again as I deliver mail.

I go through spurts…I’ll listen to some self-help courses, listen to some novels on tape, listen to the radio and all the DJs yelling, maybe listen to a language course for a while…learn how to order a taco or something else to eat.

Some times I’ll listen to the “Best of the Doobie Brothers” for a couple of weeks straight.

Right now, I’m listening to the Bible.

Yesterday, one of the stories that I heard was the one where Jesus was in the crowd of people and this woman, who’d been sick for a long time, reached out and touched the hem of His garment, and was healed.

In the audio, it says that He turned to the crowd and asked, “Who touched my garment?” when He felt some of his “virtue” go out of Him.

Of course, she stepped up and told him it was her…and He told her that her faith had made her well.

That is a cool story.  That is very cool.

I listened to it yesterday…I’d heard it often over the years…probably heard it a bunch of times riding around in the mail jeep…but something struck me yesterday for the first time that was kind of interesting.

It was interesting to me, at least.  Maybe it’s been obvious to everybody else for a long time.

It’s kind of hard to say what’s obvious to anyone else.

JESUS KNEW.

He knew who touched his garment.  He already knew…out of all those people milling around, bumping up against Him, brushing against His cloak…this one woman steps up and touches Him…and something changed…and He knew.

It wasn’t a situation where he said, “Whoaaaaaaa…hold on here…what just happened?”

“Did somebody just touch me or something?!  I feel kind of weird.”

It wasn’t like that.

He didn’t say, “Awwwwww, mannnnn….they’re getting it for free again.  She didn’t even ask for a miracle…the least she could have done was ask…grabbing onto my clothes like that was the least she could do….awwwww, mannnn.”

He just said, “Who touched me?”

He knew the answer…but he GAVE HER THE OPPORTUNITY TO PUT HER FAITH INTO WORDS.

He gave her a chance to recognize what He had done.

Recognizing and appreciating all of it was a big part of the miracle.

“Your faith has made you well.”

That is….a very cool story.

Something else that struck me about a lot of the stories in the Bible is that these people don’t come at it from the same angle we do.

They don’t have a precedent of hundreds of years of worship….singing the songs, hearing the stories, reading someone elses explanation of what anything means.

They don’t have that.

We might say, at this late date, “Jesus?  I’ve heard of Him!  I would be so full on into Him if He came back…I’d be one of the faithful…let the cock crow, I wouldn’t deny Him.”

“I’ve been hearing about Him for a while now.”

Easy for us to say…we have a bunch of years to work up to that.

But how about these people coming at it fresh?  They didn’t know Jesus from Adam.

That’s amazing.

So this woman, sick…chronically sick…, comes up and touches the hem of Jesus’ cloak.

BAM….she’s healed.

What faith she had in Jesus.

And then, even though He didn’t need to, He gives her the chance to fully notice what He’s done…and quietly proclaim Him.

I could learn a thing or two from that story.

I guess that’s the point of all the stories in the Bible, though….right?

I made an “obtuse” comment…I seem to like obtuse comments…to a friend once about a “house like a miracle”.

I think that she thought I was talking about the house that we live in….and I just let it go.

I didn’t explain that I was talking about the house that she and her family built.

You don’t build something good from “nothing”.

You can save a lot of money if you’re smart and willing to work hard.

You can save a lot of money if you’re creative and have a good eye for a bargain.

Our house is kind of like that.

It was a shell when we bought it.  It had been gutted by the previous owners…who had decided to divorce during the “remodeling”…and who sold it to us during the breakup.

Shortly after having our daughter, Zoe…very shortly…we moved into this shell of a house and started what turned out to be a long project.

It’s hard to remodel without any money.  You buy or find used lumber.  You get used to pulling a lot of nails.  You might even reuse some of the nails you pull.

You don’t just hire someone to do the work. You figure it out yourself…or don’t figure it out but do it anyway…and spend the money you saved on another treated post or bag of Sakrete.

This isn’t about our house, though, although the stories are kind of parallel ones.

I guess that most miracles that we expect seem to happen all at once.

We pray…and BAM!!! The MIRACLE!!  It’s dramatic, it’s instantanteous…it’s new…and it’s noticed.

(There’s a joke that I’ve heard lately…this guy comes up on a beautiful home and garden, says to the guy working on it, “Man, you and God have certainly done great things with this property…it’s beautiful!”.  The man working on the house thinks for a minute, and then says, “You should have seen it when it was just God’s”.)

I think that’s how the joke went…I guess it’s saying that some things need a lot of hard work to really come together….or maybe it’s saying that it takes effort to make something that’s already beautiful, in its own way, into the kind of manicured and controlled beauty that we can appreciate…I don’t really know.

When you live in a miracle, and it goes up board by board on a foundation dug and poured by hand, swinging arcs of stucco, good buys on windows, tile for the roof that arrived via “good trading”….I don’t think you notice the “miracle-ness” of it quite as much as when it just materializes in the field one morning. When the “miracle” takes some time to come around, you might not see it for all the sweat.

You appreciate it…you appreciate the solidness and the warmth, you appreciate what all that work did for your family…all the good times together that formed who you all are…but in the day to day, you might not notice it.

When I say “you”, it could be interchangeable at any point with “I”.  I don’t notice things…I don’t see…people grow up and move through, and I wonder “what just happened” while I worry about getting to a “pretty good job” 5 minutes late. I miss things while I’m paying attention to details that don’t really matter in the moment, details that I don’t remember even the next day.

I miss things while I’m just doing the part of life we call “living”.

I am proud of these guys for what they built.

I am impressed by how they built it.

It’s a miracle sitting out in a high desert in the mountains out West.

When I’ve had a chance to “really notice”, that’s what I see.

It’s a part of one family’s miracle.

My father made lefse.

He’d make huge batches at Christmas so that he could share with our Scandinavian friends in the area.

He didn’t have a commercial facility…just a flat stick, a griddle, a cloth to roll the lefse out on, and a bunch of flour and potatoes.

It was a big deal for some of these families to get some lefse if they lived down south.

You can get chowchow…but if you stop at a roadside stand and ask for some lefse, they usually look at you kind of funny.

Watching this video, you wouldn’t believe that lefse could inspire such excitement.

These Scandinavians have an understated way about them a lot of the time…excitement is hard to read a lot of times.

My father’s lefse was really good lefse…all the Norwegians I know who had a chance to taste it thought so.  It inspired a lot of Scandinavian overstatement and excitement like, “This is good lefse that your father makes.”

No one ever said, “That lefse? Uff da.”

I watched him make it for years…mixing up the potatoes, flour…and I think a little salt…butter?sugar? I can’t remember….not too dry, not too moist…rolling it out on the cloth and then picking it up with the flat stick so he could transfer it to the griddle.

This was a long time before the internet..so I think he learned how to make it from his mother.

I watched him, but I think that it would take a while to get up to speed with any of my attempts.  I should give it a shot…I don’t know that anybody in the immediate family is messing with making lefse.  I bet they’d enjoy eating some again.

Dad had a very calm and precise way of doing things…so his lefse was pretty consistent.

When he made a batch, he knew what to expect.

People knew it was going to be good.

I slept in this morning…6:30 instead of my usual 5:00…so I’m feeling more tired than wired today.  Something about “over sleeping” makes me groggy. I’m groggy so I needed to write about something calm…like a Norwegian potato “bread” called lefse.

I should be eating a piece of lefse…buttered and sprinkled with sugar, rolled up like a Nordic burrito…I should be eating a big piece of lefse and looking out over a fjord somewhere in Norway. That would be an interesting thing to wake up to with my family.

We need to get Sparrow her passport…and then?  Who knows where we might end up.

Lefse and a fjord….here we come.

Here’s another YouTube video I found.  A different feel to this one…dreadlocked lefse making with a rock soundtrack is different than a tour of Northern Minnesota “Scandinavia-ville”.

If there was a piece of pie sitting on the kitchen table, and I wanted it, I would circle the table like a wolf around a campfire, teeth bared, eyes blazing in the firelight, growling…

Now of course, if someone else was in the room, and they felt like they’d enjoy a piece of pie, I would probably defer to them.  I know they’d enjoy it more than me…and they probably deserve to enjoy a nice piece of pie more than I do, too.

Just kidding…I’d fight for pie.  I’d want that pie for myself.

That’s the way it might go down in the physical world.  I like pie.  I want some pie.

Now, metaphorically speaking, I’ve started to think about the pie from a little different angle.

I’ve read some things that talk about how people sometimes think that if someone gets a piece of the pie that there will be less pie to go around.

If someone gets a piece of the pie…I won’t get my piece because it’s already been claimed.

They ate my pie! THEY ATE MY PIE!!!

Darnit…why don’t I ever get a piece of pie?  It’s just my luck…coming to the kitchen for a piece of pie and someone else beat me to it.  It happens every time.

I’ve figured out though, for selfish reasons, that I want all my friends to have a piece of pie.

I want everybody in the whole world to have a piece of pie.

Somewhere, somebody is thinking, “HEY!!  WE’VE GOT TO GET OVER TO RORVIG’S HOUSE!!! HE’S GOT PIE!!!”

I don’t have any pie.

What I was thinking is how much fun I have when the people around me are having fun.

That’s where the “selfish” part comes in.  I realize how keeping people happy benefits me.  I reap the benefits of someone else’s satisfaction.

Now, I’m not even close to completely altruistic.  Or even partially altruistic.

I’m as selfish as they come sometimes.

If I was sitting around a table of pie eaters, and I was the only one without a piece of pie, I be pretty PO’d.

I’d be seething.  I would not want to be at a party like that.

But it sure does take the edge off when the people around me are happy.  I like that.

If I can be a vehicle to drive my friends to Nirvana, then let’s all pile in the clown car and have a good time.

That sounds like a blast to me.

If it means that I have to watch my friends eat the pie…and the best I can do is say, “Is it good?!  It sure looks good…I bet it’s good, huh?!” well…that may be just another part of my fun.

There is pie galore in the world.  I’m not going to have just one chance at a piece of pie.  I can share the pie.

“My world is better when your world is better when their world is better, etc., etc., etc.”

PIE FOR EVERYONE…LET’S HAVE A GOOD TIME!!

You don’t see many monks walking around grooving to loud music. You don’t see many monks with boomboxes on their shoulders.

I stopped listening to my radio yesterday.

It’s busy at the post office…frenetic.  My Jeep Cherokee is piled with mail and packages…I usually can’t even see out of the windows when I leave the office to begin my deliveries.  I have a small hole on either side of the car…and if I crane my neck just right, I can get a view of who might be trying to hit me, in spite of my flashing lights and signage warning that I stop a lot.

Previously, I’d been listening to music cranked LOUD.  I thought that it might be a motivator…might spur me on to higher peaks of adrenaline fueled “mailmanning”.

It did…I was a manic mailman delivering all those packages and Christmas cards.

I rocked.

But it also made me kind of nervous.

If I need to amp it up a little more to get through an already amped up time of year, there might be something a little screwed up with my logic.

Maybe it’s smarter to try and bring it down a little.

Calm myself.

Breathe.

So I stopped listening to the radio.  No loud music, no conservative talk, no PBS reports on why the bees might be dying.

It was so peaceful.  It was easy when all I had to think about was each mailbox and the mail I was putting in it, then the next, then the next.

It made it kind of meditative.

I could almost go into a Postal Trance without some really loud Jonny Lang to keep me hyper.

But I really liked it.  I’d written about keeping things “quiet” before on the blog.

I think I titled the post “fear the quiet“.

It’s always a revelation to feel what a difference some silence can make in how the day goes.

It really can be kind of peaceful if I don’t let someone else’s frantic “art” intrude on my day.

The Bible says “Be still…and know that I am God.”

That’s pretty simple, really…but kind of hard.

We’re just a bunch of squirmers…who would want to take things down a notch just so we could hear the word of God?  Who would want to tone it down when we could go through life just ROCKING OUT!!!! Overly caffeinated and manic, bouncing off the walls and in heavy attack mode…beating each day up before it has a chance to return the aggression?

Who’d want that?

The Gospel is a simple message. Simple, simple, simple.  It contains some simple directives. “Love Me..”, “love each other”…pretty simple, really.

We complicate it.  We drink another cup of coffee and let our minds go wild, explaining to the world who “God” is.  All our theology and intellectual maneuvering doesn’t take away from the fact that it’s a simple message.  It’s a simple message that we won’t leave alone. We politicize and divide something as big and grand as spirituality because it’s what we know…it’s what we do best.

We have to leave our mark on the Word.

Maybe it’s like everyone trying to talk at once at a party…we just get excited and think that we have something to say?

I don’t really know about that…too much.

I do know that this world can be a peaceful place if I let it be.

Disclaimer:  I’m not a monk…and I don’t carry a boombox.