Deep peace of the running wave to you,
Deep peace of the flowing air to you,
Deep peace of the quiet earth to you,
Deep peace of the shining stars to you,
Deep peace of the gentle night to you,
Moon and stars pour their healing light on you.
Deep peace of Christ, of Christ
The light of the world to you.
Deep peace of Christ to you.
[A Gaelic Christian Blessing]
Wishing You Joy, Peace and Love . . . Now and Always!
Dear One –
I hope you are enjoying a beautiful June day, wherever you are.
Here in southern California the hedges are laden with honeysuckle and jasmine blossoms. The smells are delicious! There are trees in full bloom with lavender flowers and gorgeous bushes and vines overflowing with bright pink morning glories or lush fuchsia bougainvillea. Here the lodgings range from mansions and beachfront luxury homes to apartments to old-style California bungalows. There has often been an overcast of dense clouds, and my son tells me here near the Pacific Ocean this time of year is often characterized by “June gloom.” The overcast of damp air and clouds wasn’t burned off by the sun until about 3 PM the other day.
Tom, baby Colin and I went to the beach where a bay comes into the ocean. There is a breaker made of large black rocks and the area is called “The Wedge”. A score of intrepid surfers, body boarders and other wet-suited figures challenged some large waves that peaked with a hint of indigo as the curl rose over itself right at the very edge of the water, almost. On the beach we joined about twice as many people scattered in the area, some watching the activity of the surfers.
After settling the baby’s car seat and diaper bag, the beach blanket, and our flip-flops in good view of the oceanic dramas enacted in front of us to the lovely sound of the waves meeting the sand, Tom stayed with Colin, who was still sleeping. And I headed for a walk along the edge of salt water and sand as the tide crept or flowed in, sometimes coming across my toes, sometimes surprising me by splashing all the way up to my thighs, drenching my bright green shorts, but gladdening my heart, feeling welcomed and remembered somehow by the big ocean.
Then later we watched a huge pod of dark grey dolphins cavorting in front of us, no doubt lunching on a wealth of bait fish. Sometimes the fins of five or six at a time appeared and one even jumped right out of the water all together, the closest they came to us. They were really show stealers, putting the surfers to shame with their playfulness and wet fellowship.
I thought about how I was at the other side of this huge ocean so recently, and of how many times I had flown over it and spent time on various islands in the middle of the deep. I was musing about time spent on the atolls on the tops of huge undersea volcanoes, swimming in watered colored by the reflections of the sun on bright white iridescent coral sands. I thought about other times on other beaches looking across various bodies of water . . .the Atlantic, too, of course, from Maine to central Florida, skipping down this way but not in this order: Maine; Massachusetts; Rehoboth, Delaware; and Ocean City, Maryland; the Outer Banks of North Carolina at Duck; and the first visit to the Atlantic – Avalon, New Jersey, the summer I was fifteen.
Virginia Beach; St, Mary’s Island, Georgia; Solomon’s Island, Georgia; too and then down to Florida: Jacksonville Beach; St. Augustine; the top of the Gulf of Mexico . . . Pensacola, a name beloved to some friends in the Navy, too . . . now sadly threatened by the gushing deep water oil well disaster . . . Satellite Beach, so dear to our whole family and my home off and on for many years . . . the beaches near Tampa; and of course Longboat Key where my parents have lived since Dad retired more than seventeen years ago . . . and all the way down back on the east coast to Jupiter Beach . . . back up to Sebastian were the huge eastern coastal waterway rivers empty into the Atlantic.
My thoughts turned not only to oceans and beaches and islands, but to the many people I love who are associated with those places. Some are family members, many are friends and quite a few were comrades-in-arms in the old Cold War days. Once a woman and I became friends while teaming on a spiritual renewal weekend in an Emmaus community in the Fredericksburg, Virginia area. I later visited her and her husband along with their new baby daughter when I was already in ministry serving the three rural churches in West Virginia. I was taking my first break, six months into the huge transition from student to brand new pastor. They had moved from the Washington, D.C. area down to Pensacola, Florida.
I had met her husband at a potluck luncheon back on the fall of 1995. We had lunch with family members while teaming during that last fall in Seminary. He was a helicopter rescue pilot, and I had been a non-rated aircrew member with a helicopter rescue squadron in addition to my main duties helping monitor the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty when I was first on active duty. I used to fly with the helicopter squadron members when we had space launches and missile tests if a Soviet ship was off the coast of central Florida monitoring them. I know I have mentioned this in other musings. This was in the era of the first five test launches of the Space Shuttle in the early 1980s.
Anyway, when I met my team member’s husband, because the helicopter rescue community is very small, we talked about friends we had in common for a short time, but there were a lot of people at the potluck lunch and I really only spoke with him for a few minutes.
About fourteen months later, when I visited them in Pensacola, my friend and I were sitting in the living room talking in the late evening, settling down to catch up with one another. It must have looked to her husband like we were dug in for the night, so he headed to bed. However, a few minutes later he came out of their bedroom again and had a funny look on his face.
“Didn’t we meet sometime in the Air Force? I feel like we may have dated before.”
My friend looked understandably shocked, and I looked back at him with a confused expression on my face. This was 1997, and they had been married for about five years, as I remember. Because the helicopter rescue community is small as I already mentioned, often those who work in it had to spend more time than many other active duty members on remote assignments away from their families. We started asking each other where we had been where.
It turned out that in spring of 1985 when he was still single and I had been divorced for a while, when I was working with the F-15 pilots who intercepted Soviet bombers exercising off the coasts of Alaska, I had accompanied them for about a month to South Korea. There was a big annual exercise and we were stationed at a base in the southern area and they flew over the Yellow Sea in between South Korea and the east coast of China.
My pilot friends had made me “Commander-in-Chief” of shopping (CINC SHOPPING) and I had made two round trips up to Osan Air Base, where a good friend, Kent, from earlier days in the Air Force was serving his unaccompanied year, leaving his fiancée behind in Los Angeles. The whole squadron had ordered Prussian blue flight-suit style outfits with a map of Alaska embroidered on the back. On the front of the suits there was also embroidery depicting their flight wings and their tactical call signs. You’d have to know them to understand why this was important to them.
(Later, the first time they all wore them when we were in Japan for a week on the way home to Alaska, they all looked really wonderful in them.)
Anyway, I was supposed to check and make sure the Korean tailors had all the embroidered names right, etc., and check to see that the suits would be finished by the end of the exercise. Within a few days of beginning our deployment, I flew up from Kwang Ju Air Base, where we were stationed, to Osan Air Base not far from Seoul. With the help of Kent, I found the tailor shop in the maze of the nooks and crannies of the marketplace outside one of the gates of the air base. When I went back to pick them up near the end of our deployment, I also took delivery on a huge amount of wallets, purses, briefcases and other items made out of eel skin. The pilots and their wives had perused catalogs and I was in charge of bringing those eel skin dreams to reality.
O.K. So, the first time I was up there, Kent had given me a tour of his work place, and then had to be on duty until dinner time. We made arrangements to meet at the Officer’s Club for dinner. I was sitting in the lobby of the “O” Club waiting for him when two men in the usual “green bag” flight suits with helicopter rescue badges on them walked into the lobby from the main door of the club. One was a good friend I had flown with in Florida. The other one turned out to be . . . you guessed it . . . the future husband of my friend from the Emmaus team in whose living room I was sitting in eleven years later!
We all laughed when we realized it. After knowing them as a couple for about four years, it turned out I had met and had dinner with him along with my other two friends about six years before the two of them had met.
Sadly, though, I found out two summers ago that my friend, Kent, passed away about three years before that. The things you can find out through internet search engines. You don’t always want to know all of it.
But it’s better to focus on the loving memories and fellowship that goes beyond time and space.
Poignant.
Endearing reminiscences.
But back to the other side of the Pacific so many years after that time. My son was on active duty as a US Marine when he participated in the same type of exercise in South Korea exactly ten years after I was there. And here we were together with his sweet baby boy on the other side of that big drink of an ocean, so often not at all pacific.
And I also couldn’t help thinking about the tensions between South and North Korea over the sinking of the South Korean naval vessel by a North Korean torpedo launched from a submarine in late March. If only all that wasn’t still going on . . . like a broken record, but affecting so many lives in so many negative ways.
Jumping back to a few days ago, on the way to where we parked, we saw two tourists with rented surf boards and no signs of wet suits crossing a street and heading to the beach. Tom talked about how good it was the tourist season wasn’t in full play yet.
We commented on which houses we liked. Tom seems to prefer the Mediterranean style with orange or red-tiled roofs and fanciful arched windows and doorways. I liked some of them, too, but mostly just enjoyed seeing the variety and creativity displayed in the architecture of the houses as well as in the verdant and sometimes fanciful gardens.
Oh, and I don’t think I told you that last Saturday I took a walk with all four of my Southern Californian grandchildren to a nature center on the back bay. The area is the top of the same inlet that Tom and Colin and I watched empty into the Pacific the other day. Colin was in the stroller and Alexis, Drew, and Trevor were troopers walking along with me, or running ahead sometimes. The nature center has wonderful displays and is architecturally very interesting. You can look out of those big binoculars on the roof, or you can continue down the path to the center itself.
Inside, there is a children’s room with puzzles, snakes, spiders, turtles, books, and coloring papers. There are all sorts of nature displays about the flora and the fauns of the tidal marshes and the hillsides covered with tall grass.
We all had a lovely time. On the way home, though, it was getting hot. Tom and Lisa had been out doing errands, and Tom came to pick us up in the car, meeting us a few blocks from their home. We had probably walked about six miles all together and I was filled with joy from the opportunity.
When I started to write this I was thinking I would tell you more about the contrasts I have seen in Russia, Ukraine and Kazakhstan between 1994 and now . . . but I guess we’ll do that next time, OK?
Hope you have a blessed weekend.
As ever – Kathy
Consider the Lilies of the Field
[Jesus said,] “Therefore I say unto you, Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on. Is not the life more than meat, and the body than raiment?
Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them. Are ye not much better than they?
Which of you by taking thought can add one cubit unto his stature?
And why take ye thought for raiment? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin:
And yet I say unto you, That even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.
Wherefore, if God so clothe the grass of the field, which today is, and tomorrow is cast into the oven, shall he not much more clothe you, O ye of little faith?
Therefore take no thought, saying, What shall we eat? or, What shall we drink? or, Wherewithal shall we be clothed?
(For after all these things do the Gentiles seek:) for your heavenly Father knoweth that ye have need of all these things.
But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you.
Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.
Wishing You Joy, Peace and Love . . . Now and Always!
Dear One –
It’s June, can you believe that?! How time flies. I hope you had a lovely Memorial Day weekend and that you are ready for summer.
Having experienced the Russian version of honoring those who served and gave that “last full measure” in World War II, I was struck by the contrasts between the way they take note and seem to think about all that ended sixty-five years ago – and how we commemorate World War II and honor those who sacrificed for our country.
I have actually been trying to write this for a few weeks, and I keep putting it off, still processing impressions and memories, I guess. Although I have thought a great deal about the Den’ Pobedy – Day of Victory in the former Soviet Union as opposed to our Memorial Day weekend, I have also been ruminating about similarities and differences on several levels.
The first comparison has to do with our two countries – or I mean the USA and the Commonwealth of Independent States (a name you can take with a grain of salt). The second evaluation involves the contrasts I have seen in the former Soviet Union itself from the first time I arrived there on December 27, 1993. I have been going back and forth to various parts of the former Soviet Union for varying lengths of time:
December 27, 1984 through January 21, 1984 (or so) –
Obninsk (city in the Kaluga Oblast – 230 miles southwest of Moscow),
Spassk Zagorye,
Zagorsk (now Sergeev Posad again), and
Moscow (all travel between cities and towns by bus supplied by Russian Peace Foundation)
June 5, 1984 through July 2, 1984
Pushkin (formerly Tsarskoye Selo – the Tsar’s “Village” where the summer palaces of Catherine the Great and other rulers of Imperial Russia are, outside of St. Petersburg, formerly Leningrad, formerly Peterburg),
St. Petersburg, then by train to
Moscow
July 2, 1984 through July 16, 1984
Kharkov, Ukraine (arrived there on overnight train from Moscow)
Kiev – just travel by car from Kharkov to Kiev’s Airport
April 8, 2005 – August 30, 2005
Alma-Ata and by overnight train to
Astana (then flew back to Alma-Ata, also called “Almaty”)
May, 2007
Moscow – volunteering in Bishop Vaxby’s office and
In the Moscow Seminary Office
April 10, 2010 through May 25, 2010
Moscow – the Methodist Building, working on two independent studies for my Doctorate of Ministry in Missional Evangelism until May 8, 2010 when I flew to
Vladivostok, arriving the morning of May 9, 2010
Now it’s hard to know where to start telling you about what has seemed to change and what has seemed to remain the same. I guess I first should tell you that I started learning Russian in the fall of 1968 when I was in high school. Then I majored in the Teaching Russian with an emphasis on Russian and East European Area Studies at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana. My minor was French. I graduated from high school in 1970. (By the way, we’re planning our 40th reunion celebration for Homecoming Weekend – October 1-3, 2010 in our hometown of Barrington, Illinois, forty-five miles northwest of Chicago.)
I wanted to learn Russian after having studied French since eighth grade and Latin since freshman year in high school because of the trauma of the Cold War and a kid’s idea of trying to be of some help somehow. As a lot of us baby boomers were, after the Cuban Missile Crisis in the early 1960’s, we were subjected to civil defense drills, the spectacle of Nike missile sites in the Chicago area, and people who built fallout shelters in their back yard.
Because of whatever I understood (not much) about World War II and the Korean war when I was nine years old, it didn’t make any sense to me why after all that violence, death and destruction the leaders of the nations couldn’t just find a way to talk to one another rather than terrifying little children with the image of all out nuclear war. So I had this idea that maybe if I learned Russian I could somehow help explain us to them and them to us . . . or something. I know . . . idealistic and pie-in-the-sky . . . and I never thought I was the only one doing that kind of thing . . . and just wanted to help somehow.
Seems like I’m way off track. But it also appears to me that we are even in more need of peace, love and understanding in so many ways.
The biggest difference between how the people of USA -- my parents’ and grandparents’ generations went through World War II compared to how the people of the Soviet Union experienced it was that mostly we just sent people, money, equipment, weapons, food, and whatever else “over there”, whereas for the Soviet citizens the war was THERE. Estimates are that twenty-seven million people were killed. In the European part of the Soviet Union over 20,000 cities, towns and villages were completely destroyed.
Now, of course it is important to note that before the war, Hitler and Stalin signed a non-aggression pact and after Poland fell to Nazi Germany, the two leaders split it in half. The story is that in June of 1941 when Hitler’s armies invaded the Soviet Union it took most of the day to convince Stalin that it was true.
Anyway . . . the point is that there is really no comparison between what it is like to send millions of people to war, as horrible as that is, to what it is like for war to be waged on your territory.
And enough is way beyond enough.
We really have to work harder to stop the violence and keep it from happening. I know a lot of people are working on that on many levels, but there is always more to do.
Please don’t think that I am naïve enough to think it is easy. And sometimes it takes force or the threat of using force to protect people. But truly I don’t think we have tried hard enough not to use the weapons we have at our disposal these days.
And they are ever more heinous. Even the thought of using them should be unimaginable.
Another tangent. Please excuse me. I am going to try again tomorrow to more calmly tell you what I have been wanting to tell you.
Rest assured that God Who is Love and Peace, Justice, Righteousness, Mercy and Faithfulness has good plans for people of good will. And I believe we are privileged to be called on to help make peace, take care of orphans and widows, ensure domestic tranquility . . . and make it possible for every person and every family on earth to have decent homes, clean water, fresh food, job opportunities and all the blessings we take for granted. It’s a matter of sharing what we are given beyond what we need. It’s a question of the will to work for peace. It’s the idea that we can do it and find the people who believe that – don’t ask those who don’t believe in it to help.
With God all things are possible.
I hope you have a good rest of the week.
In Christ – Kathy
Peace is Possible
God will judge between the nations and will settle disputes for many peoples. They will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation will not take up sword against nation, nor will they train for war anymore.
