This has been very much a recurring theme and acknowledgment for me over the past year. Connection. My One Word for 2019, in fact. I see both the human need for connection, and the blessing of making and having good connections, in different cultures and locations all around the world. I do acknowledge that for some people, this takes effort to get past fears and out of your comfort zone, and for others of us, it’s as normal as breathing, something you actually seek out at every opportunity.
When we think about connections is it just the people that we know? Or is it the people who know us? How do we get to know them, to truly connect with them and know what is important to them? By asking questions and then listening. Truly listening. People tell me that I have a lot of connections. I do, but not in the sense that I have strings that I can pull to take advantage somehow. I cherish my connections with people who have trusted me enough to share something important, like the source of their wisdom, or concerns they have about serious things. Heartfelt losses, health scares, tragic events that happened to them or childhoods best left as a distant memory.
Nelson Mandela used the word “ubuntu“. Ubuntu is a Zulu word that means “I am, because of you.” People are people because of people. We need each other. We make each other what we are. We are connected to people because we were meant to be. Some as a result of our families; other connections are from encounters which we have had the privilege to experience. We call some of them “lucky” and others are the result of years of planning and preparation. I recently told a good friend that “I think that I’m a collector of stories”. He gently corrected me by observing that I was “a collector of experiences which have become stories”. I appreciate them all.
I appreciate every connection as a Moment of Grace.
I appreciate angels helping us on so many days. At the end of a trip up north, I goofed up and set my wallet and iPhone on the tonneau cover on the truck box, right behind the cab, “just for a second” as I loaded up the cab of the truck. Right. Just for a second. So we took off for home, and after a few minutes driving, my wife suddenly asked “Is that your phone ringing?” I reached around in the bins and the console and gasped, “Oh my gosh, I don’t have my phone, or my wallet!” And then I remembered putting them behind the cab, so I pulled slowly to the side of the road and went back to see if they were still there. Nope, gone. So I turned around, trailer and all, and we started driving back the way we came – we’d only gone a few miles, but we were on a busy state highway. Driving slowly, looking along the shoulder and in the road, after 3/4 of a mile I saw my wallet and jumped out. It was already emptied of credit cards and cash, and I found myself thinking, “Could someone already have grabbed it and emptied it?” and then I saw a $20 bill, and then a single, and then all my business receipts, then a credit card, then another. Spread over several hundred yards in the ditch. Then Ellen found more cash and credit cards on the other side of the road. We found every piece of paper and plastic spread over 1/4 of a mile on both sides of the road. No phone, though, so we got in and kept driving, ever so slowly, with Ellen calling my phone number with her phone, windows rolled down. I heard my ring tone and saw my phone sitting on the far shoulder. Otter case dinged a little, but otherwise perfect after doing a flying double twist, triple somersault at highway speed.
I was 16, and had gotten a summer-long job working for a very busy local dairyman. My official job was to cut hay, and in between that do whatever was needed on the dairy. He had a really nice new self-propelled John Deere swather, and being able to spank down huge fields at pretty high speeds, spinning 180° at the ends of the rows, was a huge treat after only using a pull-behind Hesston mower-conditioner. It was sweet, and typically occupied me for 6-7 days straight of 12-15 hour days to knock down about 400 acres of alfalfa, then do it again 28 days later. Other jobs in between included hauling chopped alfalfa to the silo blowers, or even baling or stacking small bales if they needed some baled hay in the barn for winter feeding. “Grandma” always made sure I had a good breakfast (including fried blood sausage every day) before I hit the fields. I worked alone nearly all the time, and one day I was blowing alfalfa haylage up one of the three blue 24’X80′ Harvestore structures. I knew that first unit was nearly full, so I started the electric blower, set the wagon to unload at a reasonable pace, and headed up the 80′ silo to check how it was filling. It was about 6′ from the center hole, and you shouldn’t fill a Harvestore tight full to the top. There are two holes on the top of a Harvestore, one in the center where the product fills, and one nearer the edge that functions both as a ventilation air release and is an access option if you fill tight up to the hole in the center. It was getting close to being filled, and if the flow was stopped even momentarily, the pipe would have plugged immediately, all the way to the ground, and with the blower and wagon running without supervision, there would have been no way for me to have scrambled 80′ down before VERY significant damage was caused to the blower and unloading wagon below. I started in the center with my pitchfork, tossing haylage out toward the sides while the blower kept blowing it in fast, first from outside, on top of the structure, then I scurried down the outside hatch and furiously pulled haylage toward the outside while the blower poured it in the center. There is always the possibility of either running out of oxygen in a silo, and fermentation gases have killed more than a few people who have entered silos. I was 16, ok? Anyway, it was fast and furious work, but in the end, the load finally ran out and I was ok.
I went to our place up north to work by myself on several projects, and one of the chores to finish before I went back home was to mow the lawn. Simple enough, and normally goes pretty quick if all the equipment runs well. Some of the grass is out in the open, and some is under some good-sized trees, and there are a couple acres to take care of. On this occasion, I was in a bit of a hurry for some reason, but just going about my business. Mowing one of the paths between trees, and with trees overhead also, I was cruising forward when suddenly I felt pulled backward physically, like a hand had been placed on my chest and pulled me backward while my head echoed with a voice yelling “BACK UP!” I instinctively stomped on the hydro drive pedal in reverse, and narrowly, I mean by a couple inches, missed being slammed by a long log the diameter of my head, now lying in the path in front of me. Shaking, I got off the tractor and wrangled it back off the path and into the woods. It was heavy, and unexplainable. I hadn’t seen it when it was in the air above, and I couldn’t really tell even where it came from. All I know is that I was pulled back, physically helped, that day.
My cousin’s wife contracted pancreatic cancer in her 30’s. They had 3 beautiful young daughters, and the fight was gallant, but in the end she lost the battle. Seeing her at home in a hospital gown, IV’s wheeling around, trying to go about her day, was a hard thing for everyone to experience. She never gave up, and my cousin, Andy, was so full of faith and grace and hope all during the year she was undergoing treatment. He is a great inspiration to me and many others, as his faith is so solid.
On one of my China trips, I finished my China business in Shenyang, and had the weekend before I continued on to Japan on Monday. Easter weekend as it turned out. Now Easter is not a huge holiday across China, but this one was an especially reflective and spiritual one for me as it turned out. I took a short train ride from Changchun to Shenyang, and I had read ahead about a very special museum located there. It is the home of the 9.18 Museum, a chilling museum which tells such an important story, commemorating September 18, 1935, the day Japanese forces invaded China and subsequently occupied Shenyang and the surrounding peninsula. It displays disturbing photos depicting the carnage of war. The exhibition is cruel, but it tells the critically important history of the early-mid 20th century between Japan and China and how important the peace is. I visited the museum on Saturday and it was a somber learning experience with my Chinese guide. He really did not want to take me there, but I wanted to learn. I now can completely understand why the Chinese are distrustful still of Japanese people.
Shenyang is also the home of the largest Catholic cathedral in China, the Sacred Heart or NanGuan Cathedral. It turned out that it was only two or three blocks from the hotel I had chosen in the heart of the city. Friday was Good Friday, and I walked over to the cathedral to check it out and say a quiet prayer. When I got back to my room, it was just coming up on sunset, and through the incredibly dirty windows, I looked out on the silhouette of three construction cranes that instantly had me thinking of the three crosses, outlined at dusk. Easter Sunday service was the absolute most packed, standing-room only service I have ever experienced, the organ music was great, and I stood out like an albino moose in a herd of reindeer, head and shoulders taller than any other person there, and easily the whitest. They were kind, but that is most certainly not the way to just “blend in” with the local population.
After a year of enduring a multitude of procedures, chemo, and radiation for his bladder cancer, Dad was sent home from the hospital with hospice support after his ureters became blocked in the end. Doctors estimated he had a week as his kidneys backed up, but he had decided, with a great deal of discussion and forethought, that if this happened, he did not want any more surgeries or the rest of his time to be spent in a nursing home. His call.