Memories…they’re recalled in a nanosecond but they take a lifetime to create.  My Mom’s house is filled with memories; thus, filled with life.  Present life.  Or life gone by, but nonetheless, life.  Scripture always associates life with water or rivers or streams.  Oddly enough, at my Mom’s, the kitchen sink and surrounding area is the most life-reminiscent spot in the house.  I love drinking from her faucet for a couple different reasons.  First, she lives in an old house filled with steel pipes which guarantee the coldest drink no matter the season.  I love a cold drink.   But secondly, and most importantly for this story, in the 5 or 6 seconds it takes to draw a cold drink into an old glass, my eyes open the doors to places only my memory knows the way to.  My feet don’t move; however, my eyes and mind take me places my body can not go.  While my feet remain rug-bound, my eyes are bombarded with life and emotion.  Those 5 seconds traverse nearly 4 decades of memory for me.

     On the window sill above the faucet, staring back at me, are pictures of my Mom as a little girl.  The pictures are difficult for me to imagine yet intensely emotional as I try.  I cry every time I look at those pictures.  There is my Mom with her Mom, Grandma B or “Gagga B” (pronounced Gah Gah B) as she was affectionately called cause we couldn’t say “Grandma” correctly.   And, by the time we could, we didn’t want to.  It would’ve been like changing her name in midlife.  There’s another black and white photo of my Mom sitting down in the grass as a little girl.  She’s wearing a dress and frilly socks with shoes that are too nice to play in.  Her age in the picture is close to the same age my daughter is right now.  In that millisecond, as I glance at Mom’s little picture, I’m acutely aware of how quickly I reached 39.  Sorry for the digression…how did I get here?  Oh, yeah, that picture on the sill.  Anyway….

     Near the sink, on top of my Mom’s coffee maker, there’s an Eight O’ Clock coffee knick-knack.   Eight O’ Clock was Grandma B’s coffee brand of choice.  (That knick-knack’s still full of nickels my Dad threw in it for no particular reason.  He died in 1991.)  When I was 5, I can still remember watching while the grocer poured the bag of beans into the grinder first, so he could grind them while he finished  bagging up the rest of Grandma B’s groceries.  The old guy at the A&P was practical; very efficient, so it was with that entire generation.  That grinder generated more decibels than any concert I attended in high school.  Neither Ted Nugent nor Angus Young were able to hold my teenage attention span as remarkably as did that loud, coffee grinder during my years as a preschooler.  My eyes were glued to that growling monster the entire time the grocer finished bagging up Gagga’s groceries, which always included  2 lbs of bologna, a dozen fried-cake doughnuts, “Efferdent” denture glue, County Line cheese and the cheapest toilet paper available.   Grandma B lived most of her life with toilet paper as a luxury, not a necessity.  She lived her entire life in the plowed field of necessity overlooking the pasture of luxury; close enough to observe the pasture but totally beyond her ability to reach it.   SHE was what Brokaw referred to as “The Greatest Generation.”  She was alive for both World Wars, Korea and Viet Nam.   When I look at that Eight O’ Clock coffee knick-knack I’m so taken aback to the mid-sixties that I can smell that bag of fresh-ground coffee just like it was yesterday.

     I always got to push Gagga’s cart as we walked back to her house.  She never drove…EVER.  Grandma B witnessed in her lifetime the greatest transportation changes known to mankind.  Her life just so happened to have occupied the 75 year span where man went from horse and buggy to crude motor car to jets breaking Mach 1 to man landing on the moon via rocket-powered spaceships.   Can you imagine?  Television would aptly title her life, “From Gunsmoke to Lost In Space: Transportation During The Life Of Gagga B.”  We still walked to the A&P every week.  She told me stories all the way there and back.  As I write, I can still see the cracks in the sidewalk.  I memorized every one of ‘em as I walked that route every week during the years Gagga B babysat me.  I’d give the washtub of tears I’m leaking right now just to hear her tell one of her stories about growing up during the depression.  Hell, I’d even push her cart for the 3-block trip.  Are you kidding?  All this memory from an old Eight O’ Clock coffee knick-knack?  Yes, but wait, it gets worse…

     While the glass is still filling, I always look at my Mom’s collection of coffee mugs.  There’s one from the Crystal Cathedral that Mom bought when I took her with me and Robyn, my wife, to California.  She’d never been to California.  Dad wasn’t much for flying.  He’d drive us half-way around the world to do something fun but boarding a plane was NOT an option for him.  Whenever Greta (my Mom) would badger him, “Web, when are we going to Hawaii?”  As a family we could lip-synch my Dad’s unfettered response, “When they build a bridge.”

     There are lots of other things, too.  Taped to the wall is a phone list with all her kids’ cell phone numbers so Mom “can always get a hold of us no matter where we are.”  I don’t have the heart to tell her the number listed by my name was 6 cell phones ago.  I’ve had 9 different vehicles since owning the car that housed that cell phone.  This phone was before the one you carried in your pocket.  This phone was the kind that was mounted on the floor of my Mercury Sable, my 1986 Mercury Sable.  If my Mom dialed the number of that cell phone she’d probably be connected with Witt’s junk yard, where my car has certainly, by now, been laid to rest.  I can hear Greta arguing with the salvage yard guy overhearing my cell phone ring amidst the auto rubble, “Well, I know this is the number he gave me.  Is this a joke?  Come on, put Louie on the phone.”

     There’s an 8” brass Joshua Tree with little locket-sized pictures hanging from it.  I think my Mom would guess she’s had it for, oh, maybe 20 years.  I’m 39 and can’t remember a time in my life when it wasn’t there.  Years have such a way of getting away from you, don’t they?

     I could go on and on just with the memories that decorate my Mom’s sink.  But there’s one thing on her wall that purposed the writing of this story.  Like most of you, I was forced against the will of the Holy Spirit and my better judgment to attend Vacation Bible School.  The summer of my 6th year, I had an epiphany.  Whilst having religious dogma lobbed at me by a Sunday School teacher  reminiscent of Saturday Night Live’s “Church Lady,”  I had an epiphany.  Nothing earth-shattering.  Nothing that Congress would eventually “have to look into.”  No.  Just a normal epiphany characteristic of a normal 6-year old.  While coloring the burning bush or Mt Horeb or the Red Sea which I rebelliously colored green because it was “my interpretation of the Word,”  I had an epiphany that came in the form of a question (Alex Trabec would be proud).  Here was the epiphenol question:  Why were we being restricted to color on an 8 ½” x 11” sheet of construction paper when the church was filled with glossy acres of archaic, unyielding, wooden floors?  Those beautiful slats of lumber proved a far better medium to express our creativity than did the cheap, thin page of denominationally affordable construction paper.  They said I led a rebellion.  I say I released an idea and let brilliant colleagues express their God-given freedom of choice.  Who said 6 year olds can’t make intelligent choices?  Every single one of the kids chose the wood floor; believers and pagans alike.  It was the last ecumenical movement that church encountered to date.  We were unified in flesh and spirit.  Before Nurse Ratchet took me out of VBS permanently; literally, my last one ever, I was able to gather my “object lessons” I had made earlier that week.  As she dragged me out by my left ear, I think the kids remembered me as an object lesson of what happens when you have a great idea.  I could hear creativity being stifled.  I could sense future leaders losing hope.  However, the most important object lesson was clutched in my left hand during Nurse Ratchet’s modern equivalent of The Exodus.   That object lesson was a 5” rectangular plaster cast that states with simplicity and difficulty simply this: “Believe In God.”

     That’s it?  That’s all?  What’s the big deal?  Why would this plaster cast spiritual knick-knack mean so much to me?  It was ugly.  I painted it periwinkle to match the hair on the old bag’s head that was attempting to instill in me religious fervor.  The letters were blood red.  Periwinkle and red.  It was atrocious.  What’s the significance, you ask?  That damn thing still hangs to the left of my Mom’s sink.  I see it every time I get a drink at my old house.  It’s STILL there.  Not because she remembers where it came from.  Not necessarily for what it says, although my Mom has always believed in God.  It hangs there because it means something to her.  It will always mean something to her ONLY because I made it.  While my Mom, brother and sister may think different things about what hangs or sits near my Mom’s sink, they can’t possibly recall the circumstances that birthed that religious relic.  I remember the story vividly and always will.  That plaque brings to mind my lead role in “Korah’s Rebellion.”  I always look at it and laugh remembering the moment at which I knew I was destined for greatness.  Yes, it still reminds me that I once led a rebellion and it was good.

     That’s the only thing the periwinkle, plaster, “Believe in God” plaque meant to me up until a month ago…  I was on a multi-purposed ministry trip to Nashville that took me away from home on a rare, extremely rare, 6-day trip.  I hate being away from home for that long.  I hate it so much that I don’t do it anymore.  I can’t remember the last time my wife and kids spent longer than one night away from me.  Don’t get the idea that I’m so principled that I never leave home without my family.  Don’t think the reason is because Dr. Dobson says not to do such things.  I don’t listen to Dobson much.  Pure and simple, I don’t leave for long because I miss the hell out of my kids and wife.  They are the funniest, most enjoyable thing I’ve ever encountered and I selfishly never like being away from them, even for the sake of “ministry” and all the dimly disguised arrogance that usually accompany that specific excuse.

     In preparation for my departure I spent a lot more bedtime with my kids the week before I left.  Bedtime is very special for us.  They are calm, inquisitive and very spiritual.  Don’t think too well of them.  They’re “spiritual” nature is fueled by youthful disdain for going to sleep.  If I tried to do Bible study with them in the morning or after school…forget it.  But at night, they are mine and I am theirs.

     I was in mid-series with them.  The series is called, “A Joke & A Psalm.”  I tell them a joke, which always turned into at least 2 and usually 3, then we read a Psalm together.  Then we pray.  We had also been spending time asking God to reveal pictures and visions to us.  We prayed every night for Him to speak to us.  You can’t imagine what God spoke in word and vision to my 6 year old son and 9 year old daughter.  He is so God; what a Father to them He has been.  Anyway,  I returned and picked right back up with “A Joke & A Psalm.” (We’re still in that series…we may never finish it)  I had missed them so badly that my attempt at appeasement included 5 or 6 jokes.  Truthfully, it included so many jokes that we never really got to a Psalm that night.  The Lord was totally cool with that because I was releasing some jokes even He hadn’t heard yet.  I asked Jazzi, my daughter, what the Lord had spoken to her while I was gone.  She told of a forest with a huge hedge around it with a narrow opening.  She felt like God wanted her to go into the forest, through the opening in the beautiful hedge, even though she’d never been there before.  As with most visions, I asked her how she felt while she was “seeing” it.  “Invited,” she said.  Invited?  Invited?  What kind of a sensory perception was that for a 9-year old?  Wow, I was blown away and knew it was from the Lord.  That isn’t Jazzi; she’s always afraid of things she doesn’t know about.  But this time, because of the Lord’s revelation, she felt “invited” and therefore, not afraid.  Cool!  I was jacked up!

     I looked at my 6-year old.  Brody is traditional.  Habitual.  Doesn’t adapt to change very well.  He was laying in my bed, on Mom’s side which is always the side where I put him because he pees the bed every night.  He was lying in the same form as the night I tucked him in before I left.  He puts both arms behind his head, stares at the ceiling, listens intensely and poises his eyebrows as if savoring a puff off his favorite pipe while contemplating the latest Eugene Peterson book.  He waxes philosophical like no other kid I know.  I said, “Well, Brodes, what did the Lord speak to you?”  Without even looking toward Jazz and I, he returned to the eve of the vision with vivid recall.  “I was in a classroom but not one at school.  This one had big chalkboards all around the room.”  “What else?” I asked.  “In big letters covering all the chalkboards, it said ‘Trust in the Lord.’”  “What did that mean to you, Brody?” I probed as is my nature.  His response took me back to the very time when I was his age; when I was 6.  He looked at me, he looked purposefully into my eyes and said, “Believe in God.  That’s it.  It means ‘To Believe in God.’”  I kissed them quickly and staggered out of my bedroom.  I couldn’t contain myself.  I laughed and cried and laughed and cried.  Man, when I was 6 years old, I clutched that periwinkle and red plaster wall-hanging while I was being dragged out of church by my ear.  I was proud that I had led a rebellion.  My son, my 6-year old son, in the absence of his earthly father, held onto a vision that his Heavenly Father revealed to him.  At age 6, full of the simple, ridiculously powerful faith of a child, Brody came to the complete understanding of the Kingdom of God…to trust in God.

     I still think of that summer’s VBS when I draw a drink at Mom’s and I laugh.  But now, with a greater reminder in tow, I will also always remember my boy…arms tucked behind his head, prescribing to me the greatest accomplishment ministry could hope to attain.  I learned, and am still learning, to “believe in God.”  At 17 I took my own first step in that belief.  At age 6, that belief appeared almost innately in my son, Brody.

     Remember where we began?  I started this story with a drink of water at my Mom’s house.  That glass of water took less than 6 seconds to fill.  The memories I remembered during its filling took 39 years to live. Precisely the reason memories take no time to recall but a lifetime to construct.  In that regard, they’re just like faith, or belief, or trust; whatever you choose to call it.  Memories are just like that.  Through a 6 second memory, my understanding of faith has come full circle.  I will never forget that journey.  All I wanted was a glass of water and God gave me so much more; He reminded me again of why I believe.  I’ll take a drink EVERY time He’s tending the bar!