Sunday, August 29, 1999 - The Sword of the Lord, and of Gideon!

One day I heard a dreadful crash in the nether regions of the house.


“Oh!” I cried, “Whatever was that?!”

Caleb’s voice responded, “I just banged my head, but it doesn’t feel as bad as it would’ve.”

I think he meant, it could’ve been worse. I think.

One evening Larry and I walked to the grocery store. While in the store, we forgot we didn’t have a vehicle, and, being rather hungry, we got so many groceries we could hardly lug them home again. Upon coming in the door, Larry remarked, "You know, there might be lots of people taller than me, but, after that trek home, my arms are lots longer."

Tuesday I printed all my children’s story poems and started rewriting the poem Adam and Eve. Tuesday evening we had practice for our special songs for Grace Gehring’s funeral. The Wrights’ quartet sang Meet Me There; and Kay and Evelyn, Annette’s sisters, sang One Moment in Heaven Will Pay for it All.  Karen played her violin with them. It was beautiful, very touching.

Teddy was sick for two days, and missed work--highly unusual, for him. Did I tell you that he won a prize for perfect attendance last year? That, in spite of a few asthma attacks. The teachers were impressed. The rest of us were not feeling well Wednesday, either; but we all managed to make it to the funeral.

The lady who helps plan the receptions and dinners at our church asked me to bring two large bags of potato chips. Since I don’t like potato chips, I instead got four medium bags of sun chips, which I consider infinitely better, and which I hoped we would wind up with at our table.

No such luck. We saw no sun chips, only potato chips. And after the reception, somebody gave Larry three large bags of potato chips, of all things, to bring home, because there were so many extras. They also gave us lots of sandwiches and cake. There didn’t seem to be any sign of those sun chips anywhere, not even an empty bag.

Larry decided that the ladies who came early to get the food ready had eaten them all.

But later we learned from Teddy and Joseph that the sun chips had been in the room where the boys ate. Evidently the ladies didn’t think sun chips looked appetizing enough for the main room. Some of the boys wrinkled their noses: “What are those?” But after they tried one, they gobbled down two bowls full!

That night, I finished the poem, Adam and Eve, and printed it. Now I need illustrations for all my children’s poems. I might make a stab at it, but the poor children reading the book would gaze at the strange apparition on the page, scratch their heads, and wonder if they were looking at a pig, or a giraffe.

Thursday we got a letter with two pictures from Pablo, Keith's Argentinian penpal who had come to his wedding. The pictures were of Pablo on our four-wheeler on sandbars in the Loup River, and of Pablo and Teddy standing together in the Loup, with the four-wheeler behind them.

I asked Teddy, “How did you get this picture with both of you in it?”

“Oh,” Teddy explained, “A lady who was hiking along the river with her dog took the picture for us.”

“Oh?” said I. “And just which one of you asked the lady to take the picture?”

“Pablo did,” replied Teddy.

Just what I thought. In spite of the fact that Teddy lives here while Pablo doesn’t, in spite of the fact that Teddy speaks English much easier than Pablo, it would be Pablo that asked such a request of the lady. Teddy doesn’t do those things, nosiree, huh-uh! Why, it nearly turns Teddy wrong side out to have to ask a clerk in a store where a certain type of merchandise is. And he’s liable to come unglued and fall right apart at the hinges, should he have to return an item.  Horrors.

He doesn’t really seem all that timid, but I tell you, he sho’ ’nuff is that timid.

We’ve been buying orange juice (nothing but Tropicana with extra pulp, thank you) by the gallon, hoping it would benefit all the people with colds in this household. Hannah poured herself a glass full and gulped some down. “Boy, that hurts my throat!” she complained.

Victoria studied her, looking a bit puzzled. “The boy does?” she queried.

One day we brought the little wooden table and chair set, which had been in the corner of Victoria’s room, out to the living room. We put little dishes, plates, and silverware on the table. Victoria came around corner, saw it, and opened her mouth wide in a happy, beaming grin. Old toys resurrected make for a whole lot of new fun! The littles were all entertained for hours.

Thursday, Larry and Joseph went to Omaha to take something to the plastic-bead-blasting company. They also picked up a door for the car Lawrence and Norma bought. After their errands were done, they went fishing at Two Rivers, where they caught two rainbow trout. The fish are now residing in our freezer.

I am working on Chapter 3 of my book. It is rather slow going, partly because I am working from an old calendar on which I kept a journal of sorts, and partly because I am having trouble deciding what all to write. Once I get done with the calendars and start on the old letters I’ve saved, I’ll be on Easy Street.

Friday night we had corn dogs for supper. Fresh out of the oven, they were too hot for the littles. A few minutes later, Caleb asked, “Now can we eat our dog bones?” and then he realized he’d made an error, and grinned sheepishly. “Uh, I mean, er, dog…uh, what are they?!”

Victoria laughed. “Is Caleb going to eat a dog bone?”

Later, she was stacking little jars of lip balm together. “Look what I can do now!” she said to me. I turned around to see. She pointed proudly at her pyramid. “I used to knock them over!” she told me. She nodded an affirmative. “When I was litto I do that.” She looked at me. “I do. I do that, when I was litto.”

Friday afternoon I went to the Wright’s house to see if I could help Bethany, Bobby’s mother, figure out a few things about her computer. She is using the computer that I used when I typed Daddy’s sermon notes. My nephew, David Walker, donated it to the school, especially for Bethany’s use.

On the way to her house, I very nearly crumpled up the nose of our nice Suburban when some idiot who was turning left--in fact, he’d gotten himself clear over into the left, oncoming lane--suddenly changed his tune and dived headlong back across the road and went shooting up a driveway on the right. I stomped on the brake pedal with all my might and main, squalling the tires momentarily until the anti-lock brake system got itself in gear. When the ABS comes on in full power, it makes the most dreadful rumbling noise you ever did hear, and shakes the entire rig like an earthquake. I missed his back bumper by about three-tenths of a molecule, I think, after which I showed him what my aROOOga horn sounds like. He turned his head this way and that, looking a wee bit surprised, as if he wondered whatever was the trouble with the stupid driver behind him.

That night, we drove to Yankton, South Dakota, to go camping. Teddy stayed home, because he wanted to work Saturday morning, as it would be his last day before school started Monday.

About the time we got halfway there, a drive of a hundred miles, Larry was trying to snooze and drive at the same time, so I drove the rest of way. We crossed Gavins Point Dam and stayed in the Pierce Ranch campground, with the Missouri River on one side, the Lewis and Clark Lake on the other. Saturday was a hot, muggy day; it was even hot when we first woke up in the morning. It didn’t seem to faze the birds; we heard peewees and chickadees all day. In the morning, nuthatches, jays, and robins added to the serenade that awoke us.

Yankton was having a big celebration of some sort, much of it conducted on the shores of the Lewis and Clark Lake. I think it was to commemorate the discovery of Gavins Point Dam by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark in 1804.

{What? You don’t agree?}

Men were dressed in attire similar to that which I’ve seen on men in portraits done in George Washington’s era. I would imagine they were hot; what do you suppose?

After breakfast, we drove to Niobrara, where we crossed the new bridge over the Missouri River to Springfield, South Dakota. On the north side, we stopped at the scenic outlook to take pictures. There we read a plaque about a man, only 39 years old, a crane operator, who was killed in ’96 while working on the bridge. We hadn’t known that happened. Then we went south to Royal, where there is a Rainbow Trout Farm. The children fed the trout fish pellets, which could be purchased for five cents from a little dispenser on the order of a bubble gum machine. After putting a handful of nickels into it, it dispensed pellets without a nickel, which didn’t bother our consciences too much, on account of the fact that we were feeding the owners’ fish, anyway. Each time we tossed several pellets into the water, the fish jumped and leaped and made the water boil madly, all trying to get to the pellets at once. The children were so fascinated, they hardly wanted to leave the fish farm to go to Grove Lake, where we planned to fish.

At Grove Lake, we saw pheasants, a family of wild turkeys, butterflies and dragonflies of all colors of the rainbow, and birds of all types. And we caught… one bluegill. But that’s okay, because we usually catch… none.

I tell you, by the time next August rolls around, we just might have an entire meal’s worth of fish residing in our freezer, we just might!

Keith and Esther, and Bobby, too, came for dinner today. We had tuna fettucine, lettuce salad, fresh-baked biscuits just like Kentucky Fried Chicken’s, and peach/pineapple salad with a sour cream/cream cheese dressing. For dessert, we had raspberry rumble ice cream and honey peanut caramel cluster ice cream. Mmmm, yummy!

My brother’s sermons today were about Gideon and the Midianites, a story I love. The pitchers that Gideon's men held are typical of ourselves--our bodies of ‘clay’. And, just like the pitchers, we must be broken--made in subjection to God--in order to let our light shine, as the torches inside the pitchers did, as soon as the pitchers were broken. The shout--that is typical of our testimony. I love the shout they made: "The sword of the Lord, and of Gideon!"

I remember teaching this lesson to my little Sunday School class of children ages 4, 5, and 6. I started teaching when I was thirteen.

I said, "Now, 300 men may not seem like many, especially when you remember how many Midianites there were. But you just think about what it sounds when you drop a plate and break it. Your mother comes running, even if she's in the very back room of the house, doesn’t she?”

Several children nodded, grinning.

"Well then, just imagine what would happen if you stood up on the table and dropped the entire stack of plates all at once!"

The children began to laugh (quietly, since there was another Sunday School class just on the other side of the door).

"Now, think what it would sound like if there were three hundred plates!"

I especially remember the look on my nephew Robert Walker's face. He was six then, and I never had another child in my class who was so bright, so expressive, so attentive. I had all the children repeat after me: "The sword of the Lord, and of Gideon!"

Many mothers told me that for several weeks thereafter, their children went around proclaiming, "THE SWORD OF THE LORD, AND OF GIDEON!"  (None reported any stacks of plates broken, fortunately.)

Time for supper.