Free Offer: Bella and the Prince of Spices

Paper-copy reprints are now available for my short story, "Bella and the Prince of Spices." These little pamphlets contain only the text for the story itself, not the sermon that accompanies it (which you can find several posts below this one). The story is available absolutely free of cost or obligation; all you have to do is send me an email with your mailing address.

Hide and Seek

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It seems like from the beginning of the time of the human race, God has been playing an elaborate game of hide-and-seek with the people He calls. "Seek My face," He commands, and our hearts reply because of His own grace, "Your face, Lord, I will seek." And God, instead of then bursting out of the darkness into our lives, laughing and saying, "Here I am!" continues to remain hidden, mostly: Hidden from our experience, hidden from our every-day, hidden from our mundane.

If you look at the world that surrounds us, it would be easier sometimes to believe that there is no God than that we have a loving Father who tenderly watches over our every waking moment and guards us while we sleep. Wars and rumours of wars. Famines and earthquakes. Abortions and infanticides. Ethnic cleansings. Tsunamis. Crime. Neglect. Disease. Sudden and surprising heartbreak. Spousal abuse, child abuse, poverty and starvation. Is this the creation of a loving Father? But still the call goes out from God, like a whisper of breath in our ears, in the midst of the noise and clamor of our warring world: "Seek My face." And in the midst of our sin and confusion, we are surprised and somehow delighted to find our own hearts responding, "Your face, O Lord, I will seek."

In Old Testament times, people were afraid to look upon God, and rightly so.

We already read this morning about Jacob and his face-to-face encounter with the Lord, how he was blessed by God but walked away from that encounter with a permanent limp.

The Treasure of the Lord's Prayer

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When I was a child, my mother used to come in and sit at my bedside every evening to hear my prayers before she turned out the lights. In our family, we didn't say the "God bless Mommy, and God bless Daddy" kind of prayers; we recited "Now I Lay Me." It might not have been very deep or searching or theological, but it was something--something to remind us little children that there was a God in Heaven watching over us at night.

Now I lay me down to sleep;
I pray the Lord my soul to keep.
If I should die before I wake,
I pray the Lord my soul to take. Amen.

When my sisters and I grew a little older, we graduated from "Now I Lay Me" to The Lord's Prayer. We'd recite it every night with the same passion and intensity that we'd recited our earlier prayers--that is to say, virtually none.

By the time I got to the age where my Mom quit listening to my bedtime prayers, I had it down to the point where I could say the whole thing in about one-and-a-half seconds.

OurFathew'art'n'He'n-ha'db'name-kingd'mcome-w'b'done-da'ybread,f'rgiv's'r'debts-kingd'm-pow'r-glory-f'rever. Amen!

I say that to my shame now, but that's really how I did it. I didn't honor God with such "praying," but at least my mother tried to remind me, night by night, that He was there.

Bella and the Prince of Spices

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Once upon a time, there was a slender young girl named Bella. She was very poor, and all she had to eat was a daily portion of watery, tasteless gruel. Day after day, she would sit at the table with her bowl before her, dreaming of nothing so much as a spoonful of sugar to sweeten the taste of her meal.

"Oh, for a bit of sweetness," she sighed. "If I only had a pinch of sugar, how happy I would be." She said this to herself every day, not remembering to be thankful for the gruel's nourishment, only resenting its blandness.

One day, there came a knock at her door: rap, rap, rap! Scurrying to answer it, she found a smiling, whiskered man there, clad in a beggar's rags.

"Yes?" Bella asked politely.

The man stepped into her small room with a grin and a bow. "I am the Prince of Spices! I have come in answer to your prayers!"

The Prince of Spices? Bella had never heard of such a thing! He certainly didn't look like a prince, and she said so.

"Ah, but appearances may deceive!" he winked. "Your Ladyship's wish?" And with that he reached into the folds of his rags, and produced a little paper packet filled with a brownish powder. "Where is your porridge?" he asked. She pointed to the table, and the Prince of Spices opened the packet, drew out just a pinch of the powder, and stirred it into the gruel.

"There!" he cried triumphantly. "Taste and see!"

Words that Hurt, Words that Heal

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My stepdaughter Dana and her family joined us for dinner last night. Dana is a smart girl, bright and sensitive, with a tolerably good sense of humor. And I've always taken an inordinate amount of pleasure in trying to get her to laugh, or at least smile, or failing that, grimace.

That's where I get into trouble. My own sense of humor tends toward a celebration of the absurd. As the great observer of humanity C. S. Lewis noted in The Screwtape Letters, a joke exists only with the sudden perception of some incongruity. True for me! The more ironic I find something, the better. (Maybe that's why I dislike so much of what passes for "comedy" these days. Instead of trying to exploit incongruities and reveal something truly funny, which is hard work, today's writers appeal to the lowest elements of our society: foul language, which is no longer shocking enough to be incongruous, and jokes about sex.)

Not everyone, of course, shares my sense of the absurd. I can't begin to tell you how many times people have been shocked or offended at what they perceive as a lack of sensitivity, propriety, or compassion on my part … when all I was really trying to do was make them smile.

Wait--that's not quite true. While I would have been perfectly happy to have made them smile, what I was really after was the approval, the admiration, of the person behind the smile. "That Bob--he's always so funny!" "Yes, isn't he, though? What a great wit!" "He must be really smart!"

While I'm pretty sure people don't really say things like that out loud any more, I'd really like them to think that about me. So my marvelous sense of humor is exposed at last for what it is in truth: another pathetic attempt to stroke my own ego, another vain genuflection at the altar of self-worship.

That's where my introspection inevitably leads. And while I humbly thank God for the revelation--which, though it smarts, brings healing--this article is really about outrospection: how do my actions affect others?

Which brings me back to Dana.

More, perhaps, than any other person (at least in the last ten years), I have seen in Dana's eyes the sting of pain when some misguided attempt at humor has gone awry. Again! Time after time, I have tried to exalt my own cleverness in some meager attempt to win her approval, only to leave her briefly hurt and confused. She entrusts me with a bit of her heart, and then I betray her by wounding her with my words.

I did it again last night. She had almost gotten out the door without incident, but didn't quite make it. It doesn't matter what I said. It was an attempt to be witty, and it misfired. And just for a moment, I saw the familiar old pain in her eyes, before she realized that it was just another one of those moments.

Is that better, I wonder? Is it preferable to be misunderstood as a failed comedian, or correctly perceived as a fool?

The awkwardness between us doesn't last. I usually apologize, she always forgives; there is love and grace between us. But why do I have to go there in the first place?

More than ever this year, I am trying to put into effect the admonition of the Apostle Paul: "Let no corrupt word proceed out of your mouth, but what is good for necessary edification, that it may impart grace to the hearers" (Ephesians 4:29 KNJV).

My God, how short I fall! But what is a nobler goal for me--that people should think me clever, or that my words impart grace? God, help me to choose the better portion.

And Dana, sweetheart--I'm sorry. Please forgive me yet again. And pray for your mother. She has to live with me all the time.

Resolution for a New Year

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"Tell me a little bit about yourself." We've all had chances to do that; maybe a job interview, maybe meeting somebody new at a party.

Most of us, when asked to describe ourselves, would give an answer something like this: "Oh, I'm 5'7", a little overweight. I work for ABC company and I like jazz music. A huge Steelers fan. I'm a Democrat, a member of Local 202, but I vote for whoever impresses me the most. I give blood to the Red Cross and sometimes I volunteer for the Boy Scouts. I like to donate a little money to St. Jude's and the Heart Association. My daughter just gave birth to my first grandson, and I'm just as pleased as I could be. Oh, what else? Well, I'm a member of the Methodist church. I guess that's about it."

Don't think that I'm mocking you if that sounds a little like what your answer would be. Those are all acceptable things to say if you were posed such a question. But is that how you really regard yourself in your heart of hearts?

I hope that being a member of a church wouldn't be the last thing you think of. And I hope even more that being a member of a church would not be a poor substitute for a living, breathing, growing relationship with a living God, who is constantly breathing life into you as you mature in your faith.

Once to Every Man and Nation

I remember singing this hymn one time when I was a kid growing up in the Baptist Church, and I was just amazed. We had never sung anything like this before! I didn't even know it was in the hymnal! And to be sure, it's not in many hymnals any more at all.

From the first dirge-like tones coming from the organ, I was captivated. (For those of you with a working understanding of hymn melodies, it goes to the tune called Ebenezer.) Reflecting on it now, I imagine it would sound terrific with pounding 6/8 drums, and power chords on the electric guitar.

But it was the words that gripped me. I found out much later that they came from a much longer poem written by James Russell Lowell around the time of the Civil War, but the four verses I had access to were infused with a timeless quality that piqued my adolescent curiosity so long ago, and stir me still. Here they are:

Once to every man and nation
comes the moment to decide,
in the strife of Truth with falsehood,
for the good or evil side.
Some great cause, God's new Messiah,
offering each the bloom or blight,
and the choice goes by forever
'twixt that darkness and that light.

Then to side with Truth is noble,
when we share her wretched crust,
ere her cause bring fame and profit
and 'tis prosperous to be just.
Then it is the brave man chooses
while the coward stands aside,
'til the multitude make virtue
of the faith they had denied.

By the light of burning martyrs,
Christ, thy bleeding feet we track,
toiling up new Calvaries ever
with the cross that turns not back.
New occasions teach new duties--
time makes ancient good uncouth.
They must upward still and onward
who would keep abreast of Truth.

Though the cause of evil prosper,
yet the Truth alone is strong,
though her portion be the scaffold,
and upon the throne be wrong.
Yet that scaffold sways the future,
and behind the dim unknown,
standeth God within the shadow,
keeping watch above His own.

While these words were originally written as part of a poem supporting the abolition of slavery, I can clearly see their application to our present American culture, as well as the potential trials of the immediate future.

The day has arrived, and will undoubtedly intensify, when the "ancient good"--morality, decency, the Gospel itself--has become uncouth in our society. The "new Messiah" of materialism offers the bloom of hedonistic pleasure if you embrace it, and the blight of society's stern disapproval should you reject it.

It'll get worse.

I often wonder how those in the present-day American church will fare when faced with the scaffold, whatever that will eventually mean to us. We do love our prosperity.

May God grant us the grace to be like those who embraced His promises and "confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth. For those who say such things declare plainly that they seek a homeland.... But now they desire a better, that is, a heavenly country. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for He has prepared a city for them" (Hebrews 11:13-14, 16 NKJV).

Happy New Year.