Jumping to Conclusions

Loud male voices bounced along the corridor, increasing in volume as the men drew near to our room. Raucous laughter, loose language, and the clearly distinguished ‘F-bomb’ didn’t make for a thrilling prospect for my getting back off to sleep. “Oh Lord, I hope they’re not boarded in the room next to us,” I groaned in silence. It was about 2:15 AM, and occurred a few weeks ago.

 

We’d experienced disturbances in hotels and motels before. Inebriated revellers are perhaps to be pitied, rather than condemned—yet shouldn’t be excused either, I suppose. That night, my wife and two grandkids slept on, while I lay awake. The noise diminished and then cut to a low level once their room door closed behind them. I offered up a silent prayer for those men and their families.

 

Now wide awake, I was a long time in getting back off to sleep and drifted into reflection. Many years ago, after a conference meeting had ended, several pastor friends and I enjoyed a time of fellowship over a light meal.

 

None of us had consumed alcohol, and yet I recall, to my embarrassment, that upon our return to our hotel after midnight, we failed to exercise consideration for other hotel guests. Our loud talk and laughter echoed along the hallways, as we made our way back to our rooms. How many people did we rudely awaken, I wonder?

 

Back to our recent hotel stay. Continental breakfast was supposed to be available from 6:30 AM, at the area near the front desk. Morning came and we went down at about 7:30. Nothing was set out ready—not even coffee. We learned that the night-desk person had fallen asleep.

 

While he slept, someone pitched the front desk computer monitor onto the floor, the damage incapacitating the computer system. The monitor and its cable dragged other components down with them and broke cables and connections, incapacitating the system.

 

The worker who’d dozed on the job was worried about losing his employment, while a computer technician scrambled to get things up and running for business again. Meantime, a growing bevy of guests, ready to head out for the day, anxiously awaited the arrival of food, several showing by their body language they were chomping at the bit.

 

May and I raised concerns about our personal information; however the clerk assured us that no guest information was taken or lost. Eventually, breakfast was available by 8:30 AM.

 

Who was responsible for this act of vandalism? Suspicions were voiced that it was an inside job.  I didn’t like my own tendency to wonder whether a member of the late-night rowdies group was responsible; that would be to jump to a conclusion without proof, and constitute prejudice.

 

Isn’t that a human trait, though? We put two and two together and make five; but who hasn’t fallen into that mode, occasionally?

 

What points to raise our gaze do we see in this story? Simply: Beware of jumping to conclusions. Did I know for sure that those guys were drunk? The situation reminded me that I’d been party to loud, inconsiderate behaviour towards others, even when alcohol consumption couldn’t be blamed.

 

Another point is that, regardless of who bore responsibility for the rash act of vandalism, hasty, irresponsible actions can negatively affect a great many people and bring stress into their lives.

 

Jumping to conclusions. Hmm, that’s my story of a lesson not quite yet learned. Have you encountered a recent incident that impressed a similar lesson on you?

 

Here are a couple of cautionary verses:

 

“Do not judge and criticize and condemn others, so that you may not be judged and criticized and condemned yourselves” (Matthew 7:1-2 Ampl.).

 

“Don't be nitpickers; use your head—and heart!—to discern what is right, to test what is authentically right” (John 7:24 Mssg).

 

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Raise Your Gaze  Family and Faith Matters

Peter’s new book, “Raise Your Gaze . . . Musings of a Grateful Heart,” is due for release in Fall, 2014.

 
Peter A. Black is a freelance writer in Southwestern Ontario, and is author of “Parables from the Pond” – a children's / family book (mildly educational, inspirational in orientation, character reinforcing). Finalist – Word Alive Press. ISBN: 1897373-21-X. The book has found a place in various settings with a readership ranging from kids to senior adults.

His inspirational column, P-Pep! appears weekly in The Guide-Advocate (of Southwestern Ontario). His articles have appeared in 50 Plus Contact and testimony, and several newspapers in Ontario.

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What Next? - Eleanor Shepherd

     Months ago, Glen reserved a cottage in Pennsylvania for our vacation this summer.  Throughout the winter we looked forward to what we would do and see on this vacation.  By the time July arrived we were counting the days.  Then on July 10th, I went for my annual check-up with the doctor.

        Anticipated events do not always unfold the way I expect them to.

            Things were normal, until she listened to my heart.  Then as her puzzled expression turned to concern, I knew something was wrong. She excused herself to call a colleague for some advice.  When she returned to the examining room she informed me that I would have to go immediately to the Emergency Room at the hospital, and she had arranged for a cardiologist to see me there. She explained her diagnosis and why it had to be checked out immediately.  I called Glen and he met me at the hospital.

            The tests were done, the diagnosis confirmed and medicine prescribed.  My family doctor would do the follow-up. I was released from the hospital at 4 p.m. I called for my follow-up appointment and left a message explaining that I would be leaving two days later, going to the States on vacation. Imagine my shock when she returned my call and informed me that she would not authorize me to travel to the cottage. Devastated, I sobbed out the news of the doctor's call to my work colleague who embraced me in a comforting hug. What a disappointment! 

            Fortunately our daughter Elizabeth, her husband, Johan and their daughter Sanna were able to change their plans and take our reservation.  They had planned to be with us for part of the time anyway.   

            Then this week, when we were visiting with doctor friends in another province, the way opened up for me to have the necessary tests required to discover the extent of my problem by meeting with their cardiologist friend.  That visit cleared the way for us to go the cottage after all.

            However, the unexpected bonus in all of this came from an opportunity to spend time with my brother and sister-in-law who live near our doctor friends.  After lunch in their home, my brother David presented me with a binder that he created filled with notes, letters and emails about Glen and me and our children.  Some of the material was from papers my Father had saved that David salvaged after Dad's passing.

            I was thrilled to discover the collection included the notes and prayer newsletters that we had   For me the timing of this discovery was perfect.  I had little of this information in my personal files.  Another plan I have for this summer is to take some vacation time and work on the writing of my new book called The Interrupted Life.  This book will include stories of many interrupted lives and what we learn from them.  A potential publisher suggested that to provide authenticity, I needed to include some of the things that we learned from the interruption of John's car accident.  It was the only story where I lacked sufficient documentation. Without that I have been hesitant about proceeding and have been asking the Lord for some sign that I really should persist in this project.

sent out at the time of John's accident.

            I have had questions about taking time to do this right now, since there seem to be so many other pressing items on my agenda these days. But, I do not see a time in the foreseeable future when that will not be the case.  Like most writers, I also wonder what I can say on the subject that has not already been said more effectively by someone else.  Yet the desire continues to burn within me to tell the stories. They have become such an inspiration to me.

            Now, I had a new question.  Were my health issues a warning to cut back on activities and did that include my writing?  I saw the gift of this binder as a green light.  The resolution of the health issues for the time being was the confirmation.  So I plan to plunge into all my accumulated resources and write the book, relying on the inspiration provided by the Spirit of God and the prayerful support of my fellow Canadian writers who are Christian.  It is a joy to share this journey, when the signposts appear to guide us.

http://emshepherd.blogspot.com

Word Guild Awards
2009

Word Guild Awards
2011

A Conversation with God--den Boer

Hi God,

What should I write about today?


Write about me.



You are difficult to write about. The words aren't big enough.

I can say you are amazing, divine, glorious, powerful, wonderful, majestic, awe-inspiring, good, full of love, truth and righteousness. But, somehow these words have been cheapened.

We call a game amazing, food divine, a sunset glorious, a smell powerful, music wonderful, a mountain majestic, a person awe-inspiring, a meal good, a house full of love, a colour true and a song righteous. You are far superior. You made the world and everything in it and the whole universe besides.

You just wrote about me. Thank you.


Marian den Boer is an author and latent writer. 

I Love Parties/MANN

Every summer, Doug and I plan a half-dozen BBQ’s, plus a few writing or business retreats. It’s a way we can pay forward and give back. This week we organized another Cousins-BBQ for my side of the family. At our age, you wouldn’t think many could come, but if five in their 80s and four in their 70s can have a whomping good time for a whole day, then we did it. Our time together resembled playing in the sand box as kids in many ways as we interrupted each other, laughed at our own jokes, finished each others sentences and one even had time-out for a sit-down snooze. Come early and leave late – lots of food – good fellowship - that’s the sign of a good party.

As not always happens in families, we are all people of faith. We talked about Sunday school days, baptisms, weddings, anniversaries and shopping days. Amazing how the threads of faith weave itself through our life stories.

One of our parents, from three different families were baptized in the local St. John's Anglican church. Tender reminiscing about how the family would come five miles into town in the late 1800’s through to 1905, with horse and wagon to say yes to God. There was probably some tea and crumpets following worship and a feeling of ‘well done, good and faithful servant’. These folks were second generation Canadian with English parentage – Ontario homesteaders in many ways. There would be struggles and heartaches that would test any faith, yet they persevered through circumstances to continue the tradition of their parents and to personally respond to God by being immersed in God’s love.

The following words are written as a welcome from the ancestral church in Aynho, England with a tower and structure dating back to the 1300’s.

“Young and old gather regularly to worship the same God that generation after generation have worshipped here. We hope one day you may worship with us.” 
 

Doug and I accepted this invitation in 2012 and were amazed and blessed at the ongoing faithfulness of the congregation. I write this not to emphasize the age of the church, but to remember ‘from whence we come’. Although I do not share the total experience that the Deuteronomist proclaims: “Remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the LORD your God brought you out from there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm”, I do claim the latter part to look back and remember that in the mid 1800s when my fore-fathers and fore-mothers came to Canada, they came out of a peasant lifestyle of servitude with a dream of owning land and building a life for a family in a new generation in a new land.

They achieved this. They carried the faith with them and taught their children who taught their children. I am grateful that as the fifth generation of those immigrants who accepted that, the LORD your God brought you out from there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm”, we can continue to share this rooted faith.   Thanks be to God. Amen

Donna Mann

Aggie Series, Brucedale Press, Pt. Elgin. 2007, 2010, 2013. (YA) The young years of the first woman elected to Canadian parliament.

A Rare Find: Legend of an Epic Canadian Midwife, 2013 (Biographical Novel)

WinterGrief - personal response to grief (2003) Essence, Belleville.

Open My Eyes That I May See - Tracy Krauss

Paul's blindness at his conversion holds special meaning for me. Like Paul, I too have been blind - literally. I was born with a congenital eye condition known as Ectopia Lentis or dislocated lens. The lenses and the lens sack are misshapen and in the wrong position. Besides that, I have bilateral amblyopia (lazy eyes in both eyes), mild exotropia (one eye wants to wander), myopia (nearsightedness), and astigmatism (wrong curve to the cornea). Pretty much everything that could be wrong is wrong! I could never see well, and in fact was diagnosed ‘legally blind’ once I went to an eye doctor, but for the first five years of my life, nobody knew!

How can that be, you might ask? Well, as far as I knew, I was normal, and the fact that I could always draw well (and spent hours drawing), probably threw people off. Mind you, the fact that I’d be an inch from the paper should have been a clue... 

When driving in the car, if someone said, “Look at the horses!” I’d go, “What horses?” which would be met with, “Quit being silly!” Or when I’d say, “Isn’t it cool how when you turn your head to the side you can see three of everything?” I think my family just thought I was a bit slow…or strange… or maybe as the fifth child, my parents were too busy to really notice… 

In any case, when I went to register for school, a nurse was there to do a routine eye check. At first she thought I was kidding when I said I didn’t see any ‘E’ let alone a big ‘E’. Soon after she was basically scolding my mother with, “This girl needs glasses!” And what a difference glasses made! My very limited world was suddenly so much broader – even though by everyone else’s standards I was still visually impaired at a best case 20/50.

I spent my growing up years going to specialists and undergoing every test known to man, all with the same outcome. After examining me, the doctor would inevitably look surprised and call in all his colleagues for a look. Apparently, my condition is a bit of an anomaly. I’ve done some research and most people with the condition have other genetic disorders as well, as in dwarves, giants and people with downs syndrome… (I don’t have any of these conditions, or at least not that I know of. *Smile*.)

When I was a teen I went to a specialist that told me I’d probably go blind by 40. Now if that isn’t something to look forward to! Mind you, when you’re fifteen, that seemed really far away, and life would be pretty much over at forty, anyway, right? So I didn’t worry about it too much. My fortieth birthday rolled around, and all was still stable. Then as I approached 45 things started to change. A rapid decline in my right eye meant I needed surgery to remove the lens which was dangling by a thread. I underwent a three hour surgery where the eye was opened, drained of its vitreous fluid and a new lens was implanted just under the cornea.

Technically, all should have been well. Except the brain is a funny thing. My brain would not accept the new information that was now coming into it through the revised eye. My left eye shut down as well, and I was now almost totally blind. I describe it more like a ‘white out’ than a black out. I could see light, and some colour, but there were no definitive shapes of any kind. If I closed my right eye and held a book about a millimeter from my left eye I could make out the words, but that was it.

My two weeks of leave from work stretched into five months; I was blind for two of them, forced to use a white cane and all to get around. During that time I knit a sweater by ‘feel’, listened to audio books including the Bible, and played the piano – a good way to stop relying on the notes or looking at the keys! It was actually a wonderfully relaxing, restful time where I just spend a lot of time praying and where I was forced to slow down. It made me so grateful for the things I did still have and it helped me to realize that even in blindness, God was good.       

After a second surgery and another three months of recovery I could see better than I ever could see before – 20/40 in both eyes. That’s still not as good as the average person, but for me it was a miracle.

I’d like to say it ended there, but I guess God is still teaching me. Shortly after my second surgery, I started experiencing extremely high pressure in my eyes, due to an allergic reaction to one of the drugs used during surgery. I had to implement a cocktail of three different eye drops to control these ‘glaucoma like’ symptoms. Another side effect took place about a year after my surgery. Because of the invasive nature of the operation, I developed a macular infection – a huge mass of swelling on the retina that acted like macular degeneration…

Are you kidding? Besides all the other things I had to contend with, I now had both ‘glaucoma like symptoms’ AND ‘macular degenerative like symptoms’?! The only treatment for the one is the thing that causes the other and so I went through a regime of treatments and counter treatments for about four years.

The result is that I am now almost totally blind in the right eye with little hope of the sight ever coming back. The left eye is still holding out, although my last visit to the specialist confirmed some movement on the part of the implant which needs to be closely monitored.

Am I concerned? Of course. On the other hand, I am not anxious. I am resting in the knowledge that God is good and He knows the course of my life. My agenda isn’t God’s agenda, but I know that in every aspect of my life – large and small – He is with me every step of the way. Like Paul, I have learned to be content in every situation.

Philippians 4: 11-13 says, “ … for I have learned to be content in whatever circumstances I am, I know how to get along with humble means, and I also know how to live in prosperity; in any and every circumstance I have learned the secret of being filled and going hungry, both of having abundance and suffering need. I can do all things through Him who strengthens me.”

The above post is a short excerpt from Tracy's devotional book: LIFE IS A HIGHWAY: Advice and Reflections On Navigating the Road of Life

Tracy Krauss lives with her family in Tumbler Ridge, BC where she writes, teaches school, paints and enjoys life. Visit her website for more details. http://tracykrauss.com