Young Again

Writing & Thought

of one who hopes.

Category: Blog

  • Of Putt-Putts and Parenting

    Of Putt-Putts and Parenting

    Growing up on a dairy farm, our first introduction to driving farm equipment was the Ford 860, an iconic little red & white tractor built in the 1950’s. Ours was equipped with a 6-foot box-scraper attached to its rear three-point hitch for the purpose of scraping the barnyard.

    She went by various names: Pop called her the “860”. Sometimes she was just the “scraper tractor”. But the most common and affectionate moniker we gave to her was “Putt-Putt”, referring to the peculiar sound of her 4 cylinder gasoline engine.

    Putt-Putt’s assigned resting spot was creatively named the “Putt-Putt” shed where she spent most of the day sitting quietly, surrounded by dirty rabbit cages, rarely-used step-ladders, an air compressor, and many other half-forgotten miscellaneous farm items.

    A Ford 860 similar to the one I grew up with. (Ours was never this clean or shiny, though!)

    A rite of passage for my brothers and me was the day we were deemed old enough to take over the daily chore of scraping the barnyard. The prescribed purpose of this event was to move the cow manure which had accumulated over the last 24 hours from the barnyard to the nearby “manure pile”. It was a fun job and one that we often looked forward to. It was however, a bit of a obstacle course.

    Scraping the barnyard involved a good bit of maneuvering around the corral gates and the wooden posts of the feed bunk, among other things. It also included a lot of driving in reverse, neck craning, as you backed into the dark alleys of the freestall barn.

    It was a well choregraphed dance of motor-skills, one hand gripping the steering-wheel, the other on the 3-point hitch lever ready to raise and lower at the appropriate time. One foot hovering over the clutch, the other resting on the brake.

    Once you mastered the Beginner’s level, you would soon be taking advantage of the differential braking system. This feature was quite handy for turning sharp corners in tight places. Need to spin on a dime at high speed on slippery concrete? Just simultaneously cut the steering wheel while pressing the right or left brake. The one rear tractor tire would lock up while the other continued turning at said speed. Physics would take over, aided by the increased inertia of the scraper blade on the rear. 180 degree turn complete. Oh what joy!

    The “Putt Putt” would eventually give up the ghost and be replaced by a diesel 70’s model Ford 4000 SU. She was our new scraper-tractor. We named her “Suzie” and my younger brother cut his teeth on her.

    Besides scraping the barnyard, both little tractors served other useful purposes in their time. Before the days of our ATV 4-wheeler, we would drive the scraper tractor up our steep hill to bring the cows in from pasture. Years of cow paths and erosion had caused some limestone ridges to become exposed. It was anything but gradual and smooth. If you drove past our farm at the right time on a summer afternoon, you would see a little tractor picking its way up the hill with front wheels bobbing and nose pointed toward the sky. The heavy scraper shifted the center of gravity toward the rear and also acted as a handy “wheelie-bar” to keep you from flipping backwards. This too brought exhilarating joy.

    Teaching his sons to scrape the barnyard came at a cost for my Father, however- mostly in the form of the money and time it took to replace the gates and posts which fell victim to the onslaughts of a greenhorn scraper-tractor operator.

    Boy, did we ever beat stuff up! Whether it was barnyard accidents or otherwise, we children unleashed our share of collateral damage on the farm. I remember one such time, as one of my siblings pulled into our driveway with a larger tractor pulling a disc harrow behind. They failed to take a wide enough turn, and the disc caught the corner of our garage, leaving behind a gaping hole amidst a tumble of broken concrete blocks.

    Time and memory would fail me to tell all the tales those old walls would hold- where youthful vigor and novice skill collided with wood, steel, and concrete.

    It’s the price of raising up children. And through it all, I have no memory of Pop getting angry at us. Now as a dad myself, I have new respect for that.

    Pop never got upset at us children for bungling jobs that he could have done better.

    Mind you now, Pop is not a man who would be described as mild, quiet, or laid-back. His voice (which I didn’t inherit) is quite ample, shall we say. Pop’s never yet been documented as having raised the dead with one of his full-throated yells…but he sure can rouse the sleeping! He’s been known to stop a car in its tracks leaving our driveway with the windows rolled up, the bewildered driver perplexed by the clap of thunder on a blue-sky day.

    If you were to make a phone call to Pop from the front yard of our house, and he answered from an open-seated tractor at the back our long field lane, you would experience a curious echo effect. His voice would be reaching your ears via satellite connection AND good old fashioned sound-waves rolling their way in from back-forty. You get the point.

    Pop never got upset at us children for bungling jobs that he could have done better.

    A Ford 4000 SU similar to our “Suzie”

    Tractors die and boys grow into men. But I think teaching our children how to mow the lawn, till the garden, and drive the car point to something even deeper that we Moms and Dads face with each new season of child-training.

    Raising children for the Lord is like walking a tight-rope of faith. On one side of the balancing bar is our desire to provide for and shelter them. On the other side is the recognition that without personal, trial-and-error experience, they will experience limited growth.

    And so, one step at a time, we prayerfully walk the fine line. We teach them concepts and values. We try to lead by example. We warn of dangers. But at some point, we must step back and let them try to do what we can surely do better. Because, believe it or not- someday that may surpass us.

    We must allow them the space to break things.

    Can they go swimming with friends? How about that sleepover? Which books do we allow on our shelves? Sending them off to school. That weekend trip. Going on their first date. You name it.

    Each parenting decision must balance our intense desire for their physical and spiritual safety with the understanding that our children need to be given enough rope so that they can learn the ropes.

    Because, we are raising the next generation. A generation that will need to take the reins of a volatile society. A generation who will lead the Church in perilous times. Wow, that’s heavy.

    Thankfully, Father God finishes raising his children, once their parents have tried and done their best. It’s called sanctification.

    Thankfully, Father God finishes raising his children, once their parents have tried and done their best. It’s called sanctification.

    One of my last major incidents involving farm equipment and defenseless barns happened when I was an older teenager. The job at hand was hauling out the bed-pack manure from our dry cow pen, using our New Holland skid-loader (gone were the days of Putt-Putt and Suzie).

    As I exited with another full skid-loader bucket of manure to dump in the spreader, I failed to see how high the boom was raised, and it caught the header above the large sliding door. Hunkering in the cab, I was suddenly engulfed in a deluge of raining concrete blocks along with decades of dust from the loft above. It seemed the whole structure might be collapsing around me!

    The aftermath of my handiwork with the skid-loader. (Thankfully, the barn was soon going to be torn down and upgraded anyway)

    After the dust settled, and I realized I was still here in the land of the living, I tucked tail and plodded into the house to tell Pop. He was taking his after-lunch nap on the living room sofa, covered in his customary blanket and face-pillow.

    “Welp”, I began in a dead-pan phlegmatic tone. “I just got done basically knocking the freestall barn down.”

    Pop sat up quickly, rubbing his eyes. His response still makes me chuckle to this day.

    There are many ways a Father could respond to a son who just announced he succeeded in wiping out part of Dad’s crucial business infrastructure. I wonder how I would respond today in that situation. “Did you, though?!” doesn’t readily come to mind.

    “Did you, though?!” The inflection of his tone would have seemed more fitting if I had just told him we had a new heifer calf born from our best cow…or maybe that I had just single-handedly cleaned out all the calf pens with pitchfork and wheelbarrow, without being told to.

    “Did you, though?” That was it. No shouting. No scolding. No belittling.

    I had broken something. Again. But it was fixable. Life would continue. Personal experience had taught me a lesson that over-sheltered protectionism never could.

    God help me to extend the same grace to my sons. Thanks Pop!

  • The Holy Child

    The Holy Child

    Part One: Which Jesus do you worship?

    “Omnipotence and impotence, or divinity and infancy, do definitely make a sort of epigram which a million repetitions cannot turn into a platitude. It is not unreasonable to call it unique. Bethlehem is emphatically a place where extremes meet”  –G. K. Chesterton 1

    Christ is first revealed to the sleeping world in the form of a newborn baby. This version of Jesus is, by far, the most palatable to the world at large. For it is only the most degraded, demonic dregs of humanity which are not in some way inwardly softened by the sight and sound of a tiny infant. We are drawn to innocence; we hover in concern over helplessness. We are charmed by beauty.

    The praise in heaven spills over into the dark skies of Judea. The announcement of good tidings of great joy ring out and bounce across the foothills of Bethlehem. The shepherds fall to the ground in shock and awe, then conclude “Let us now go.. to see this thing which the Lord has made known to us!” 2

    The birth of Christ, has arguably, had the most far-reaching influence across all eras and regions of civilization. Though often cloaked in dizzying consumerism and pagan tradition, the celebration of Christmas has infiltrated even the most secular of societies today. 

    The Magi of antiquity, squint in bewilderment at the appearance of the shimmering royal star, pore through their astrological charts, and then finally saddle their camels and plod westward in search of the King. Even so today, each Yuletide, the pagans, dusting off the old family Bible that lies dormant on the mantle, wiping the cobwebs from spiritually blind eyes, come trooping in to stare in perplexed wonder at the holy child, still sleeping peacefully. 

    Even so today, each Yuletide, the pagans, dusting off the old family Bible that lies dormant on the mantle, wiping the cobwebs from spiritually blind eyes, come trooping in to stare in perplexed wonder at the holy child, still sleeping peacefully. 

    Each year in America, as sure as the last brown leaves skitter across frosty fields and the decorative pumpkins and cornstalks find their final resting place in the dumpster- just as surely, the wooden figurines of Mary, Joseph and the shepherds are brought out from the hallway closet; the translucent plastic nativity models find their way into the front yards of middle-class America. And the baby? He still sleeps in the feed trough. Holy infant so tender and mild- sleep in heavenly peace. Ssshhhh! We must not, we MUST not wake him!

    That is where most of the world would wish that the Christ child remain. The shepherds return to their fields happy and talkative. The Magi, after a moment of obesience,  begin a long trek home, their hearts full, albeit a few pounds lighter and a great deal poorer. 

    Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, goodwill toward men! 3 As the last echoes of the heavenly choir fade back into silent night, a most sinister dynamic begins to take shape around the advent of this peculiar child. The powers of evil are mustering their forces to somehow hijack the divine purpose of the long-awaited Messiah. In an unseen realm where reality dwells, a fiery ten-headed dragon lurks in shadows, waiting to devour the child. 4

    For even now, this little boy child elicits a reaction from a local Judean despot that would be a harbinger of the broader Jewish reception to his adult ministry. When his crafty questions to the chief priests and scribes fail to locate the alleged child King, Herod “the Great”, spurred by the gnawing insecurity which often besets such brutal tyrants, resorts to the most shocking measures to insure that his throne is secure. Young sons are ripped from their mothers’ arms and executed on sight. It is a massacre of the innocents. The blood flows red in Bethlehem, and Rachel again weeps for her children! 5 But the Christ Child evades the sword of Herod, saved by a warning dream, sent from his heavenly father to his earthly father. 

    They flee to Egypt. It is a powerful irony indeed to consider that it was the Egyption Pharaoh, who a millenia and a half before, because of those same insecurities, had instituted his own purge of Jewish baby boys. There was one particular child named Moses, floating among the bulrushes of the Nile, who was saved and would later be called to lead his people forth out of Egypt to the promised land. But this time, Pharaoh would be a refuge for the special child… But not for long. “Out of Egypt have I called my son,” wrote the prophet Hosea. An inspired Matthew the tax collector would later recall those prophetic words, connecting the dots as he traces this incredible narrative of God’s only begotten Son. 6

    The magnitude of Jesus’ birth is not lost to everyone, however. Those few faithful souls who were longing and praying, recognized Him immediately.

    Simeon, a just and devout man living in Jerusalem waited expectantly for the Consolation. Guided by the Holy Spirit, he came to the temple. He had been promised that he would not see death, until he had seen the Lord’s Christ. Simeon found the Christ in the form of an eight day old baby boy. I can imagine the old man, cradling the baby, with tears of joy streaming down his weathered cheeks. He could die in peace now. “For my eyes have seen Your salvation which You have prepared before the face of all peoples,” rejoiced Simeon. “A light to bring revelation to the Gentiles, and the glory of your people Israel!” 7

    Likewise, the aged Anna from the tribe of Asher, who had seen more than a hundred Passover lambs bleed out, would recognize the Lamb of God in an instant. Anna was an ancient fixture of the temple courtyard, kneeling for years upon the cold stones in fervent prayer and fasting, and possibly living off of the occasional kind-hearted gesture thrown down by hurried passersby. Anna had found her Redeemer. And she could not keep silent, speaking of Him to all those who looked for the Redemption in Jerusalem. 8

    The little boy is taken home to Nazareth with his parents. He grows and becomes strong in spirit.

    It is at this point, that the seeker of truth must make a choice. Will I pretend that the baby is still lying in the manger, or do I continue to follow His life journey? Will I, like his mother, although not fully understanding the meaning of “my Father’s business”, still keep all these things hidden in my heart? 9

    It is at this point, that the seeker of truth must make a choice. Will I pretend that the baby is still lying in the manger, or do I continue to follow His life journey?

    Indeed, the true worshiper of Christ must, like Him, increase in wisdom and stature. We must follow the dusty path back up to Galilee, where we are drawn to the banks of the Jordan river by the booming voice of a man clothed in camel-hair and leather. A man who flings incendiary accusations at the self-righteous elites. John the Baptist isn’t one to mince words. His listeners’ ears tingle as he fires verbal grenades like “wrath to come”, “brood of vipers”, and “the ax is laid to the root of the trees”.

    Now as the people were in expectation, Luke records, and reasoning in their hearts about John, whether he was the Christ or not, he answers the question, pointing to them of One greater who was soon coming. One who would baptize with the Holy Spirit. One who would clean. Purge. Gather. And burn. 10

    1. The Everlasting Man pg 97 ↩︎
    2. Luke 2:15 NKJV ↩︎
    3. Luke 2:14 ↩︎
    4. Revelation 12:4 ↩︎
    5. Matthew 2:16-18 ↩︎
    6. Matthew 2:14 ↩︎
    7. Luke 2:29-32 ↩︎
    8. Luke 2:38 ↩︎
    9. Luke 2:40-52 ↩︎
    10. Luke 3:3-18 ↩︎

  • Which Jesus do you worship?

    Which Jesus do you worship?

    Examining the four-phase progressive revelation of the Messiah.

    There is a figure of a man who stands against the backdrop of human history, a man whose imprint on civilization dwarfs that of any and all emperors, prophets, sages and philosophers. He is the God-Man, in whom all fullness dwells. This man has been given many names, but we shall call Him the name which the angel Gabriel instructed the young virgin Mary to give her son–Jesus. Jesus of Nazareth.

    It was a common name given to Jewish boys in 1st century Judea and Galilee. “Yeshua”–God is Salvation! But this time, the name would not only be a statement of hope; a harbinger of the promised future salvation–this Jesus, would actually bear the full weight and implication of the name’s meaning. This Jesus was himself salvation. He was given a name, which is above all names, that at the name of Jesus every knee will someday bow and every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord.

    It has occurred to me that there seems to be a direct correlation between these “phases of revelation” of Jesus Christ as recorded in the New Testament and the extent to which humanity believes and follows Him. As the fullness of  Christ becomes progressively revealed to our understanding, the road begins to narrow…and the thronging crowds begin to thin.

    1. Rejoicing in a harmless baby Prince who brings peace to the earth– yeah, we’re all in! 
    2. Appreciating some hand-picked teachings of the Good Teacher and applying them to our lives– even pagan religions incorporate Him into their belief systems. Accepting that He was crucified for our sins? This is a whole different matter indeed, but still, many are willing to embrace Him.
    3. Believing and confessing that Jesus was bodily raised from the dead– now, the ‘enlightened’ materialist scoffs and turns away.  The Man who appeared through closed doors to his disciples to assign them with delivering Good News to the nations- the cultured critic sneers.
    4. Regarding the ascended Lord, who disappeared from His disciples’ view and now sits in stunning glory at the right hand of the Most High; the same Jesus who will return, saddled and ready, with sword in hand and fire in his eyes to judge the earth– now even more shrink away from that startling, all-encompassing vision of the Christ. 

    Yet, it is important that any seeker of truth recognize that it is impossible to truly accept any one of these “phases” of Christ’s revelation without accepting the whole. And likewise, rejecting the one, they have rejected Him totally.

    Jesus Christ is not some modular genie who can be reimagined and rearranged to fit our own perceived notions and whims. The swaddled baby in the manger is indeed the enthroned and returning King. The teacher, the servant, the healer, the crucified one is indeed the same One who burst the bands of death and became the first fruits of all those who have slept.

    Which Jesus do you worship? It is, of course, a rhetorical question. There is but one Jesus Christ. In Him and through Him, all things consist. The “four phases” which I find in the scriptures are progressive, cumulative layers revealed to our feeble time-constrained, earth-bound intellects. He was. He Is. He will always be.

    We shall now delve into these four “phases” of Christ’s revelation under the following titles: The Holy Child, the Suffering Servant, The Resurrected Lord, the Returning King.

    Coming soon is the first installment in this series.