Prairie Pastoral

January 7, 2023 | Leave a Comment

Science and Sin at Los Alamos

It was just ahead of lunch when we arrived at the Hans Bethe House at the Los Alamos History Museum. Not surprisingly, much of the Los Alamos History Museum’s exhibits are devoted to its national laboratory, the designing of the first nuclear weapons, and the men and women who made it possible.

The Bethe House was otherwise empty apart from my family, so the docent struck up a conversation when he saw me paying attention to Frederick Reine’s 1995 Nobel Prize in Physics on display. “I was one of his graduate assistants,” he told me, and our conversation began. [Read more…]

December 23, 2022 | Leave a Comment

Happy Christmas Eve Eve

I’ve been wishing a “Happy Christmas Eve Eve” since long before Phoebe made it famous on Friends.

Christmas Eve Eve was a real thing in my house growing up. Christmas Day, even Christmas Eve, weren’t enough to contain what was the biggest event in our year. We started prepping for it in the springtime, planning gifts, making lists, and dreaming of the thrill. The year that my sister sewed me a life-sized doll? She started it on Valentine’s Day. Really.

We needed more than a day or even two to feel that sense of expectation. By Christmas Eve Eve, we were buzzing.

As real as the sense of expectation, though, was the sense of disappointment that descended by mid-morning on Christmas Day. Gifts opened, breakfast eaten, musical still playing on repeat for the seventy-sixth time, there was nothing more but to pick through the piles of opened gifts and wonder what came next.

What we celebrated was a holiday, not a holy day. It was an event on the calendar for giving and getting stuff that was supposed to signify the love we felt for each other in ways that our poor, emotionally grifting family couldn’t otherwise express.

I suspect it’s the same for many, but the gifts can’t fill a space intended for the manger. The food can’t fill empty hopes.

Christmas is, was and always will be a holy day if it is anything. We need to celebrate it as such or not at all.

So, no, a day or even two can’t contain the biggest event in history. So, I’ll go ahead and wish a Happy Christmas Eve Eve to everyone today, but with expectation of a different sort—expectation of love that doesn’t need gifts to prove its worth, expectation of joy that doesn’t end when the wrapping paper’s off, expectation of a Christ Child who will come again to heal us all.

November 29, 2022 | Leave a Comment

Advent 1: Do Not Fear

“The extraordinary thing that is about to happen is matched only by the extraordinary moment just before it happens. Advent is the name of that moment.” -Frederick Buechner

I was a little surprised one day, visiting an older couple, to find myself sitting on brand-new living room furniture. This sweet couple was of modest means, and I didn’t remember their previous living room furniture being raggedy at all, so why the splurge? They told a story.

A friend of theirs, decades ago, had fallen on hard times financially and asked them for a loan. They didn’t have much, but they gave him what they had. It couldn’t have been more than a few hundred dollars. He promised he would pay them back, but, as happens, time passed, and they lost touch. They had not heard of him or from him for years, until a letter arrived in the mail with a check for $2000. He’d sussed out their address, adjusted for inflation, and sent along a note. “I bet you thought I’d forgotten,” he’d written, “but I never forget a promise.”

God really never forgets a promise. Through the ages, over centuries and moment to moment, God has remained faithful to his people. He’s faithful to us still now.

“So do not fear, for I am with you,” God told us through the prophet Isaiah, “do not be dismayed, for I am your God. I will strengthen you and help you; I will uphold you with my righteous right hand.” (Isaiah 41:10)

Do not fear? Easier said than done, right? There’s so much in the world that could reasonably terrify us? How do we trust God enough to let go of the fear?

The key to begin letting go of the fear is to take the long view of life, of history, and of ourselves. Even this famous verse from Isaiah 41:10 takes the long view of God’s faithfulness, all the way back to Abraham. More than that, these words point us forward to Jesus: our champion and defender who sets us free from the fear of death. It’s Jesus who promises a day when every tear will be wiped away, “There will be no more death’ or mourning or crying or pain” (Revelation 21:4).

The testimony of the past and the promise of the future are embedded in the story we tell every year of Jesus’ birth. It’s the story of a promise of a better, brighter, painless future. It’s a beautiful vision of tomorrow.

Do not fear, friends, because God is with us. He will strengthen us and help us. He will uphold us with his righteous right hand.

Whatever big job or little task we have in front of us, whatever niggling fear is keeping us from that proverbial first step, whatever ridiculous doubt of our own worthiness is whispering to us today, God is with us.

That’s a promise, and God never breaks a promise.

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