Just a note

Hey, folks--

Just a note . . .

The short version is that I'm moving this blog to www.curtisshelburne.wordpress.com. Sorry for any inconvenience! And I'd love it if you'd follow me on over there!

I plan to leave the old "archives" here, but the new entries will be at the new location (where I've also been posting for awhile).

If you'd like, I'd love it if you'd also check out a new website I'm building at www.curtisshelburne.com. I'm hoping to be shamelessly marketing a music CD by "Yours Truly" soon.

Thanks so much!

Curtis

Swimming in a Shark Tank Is Thought-provoking

Very, very little about “reality TV” is real.

Put a little lipstick on a pit bull and you’ll have something a lot more “real” and a good deal nicer than, for example, supposedly “real housewives” who are mostly collagen, silicone, high maintenance attitude, and genuinely devoid of anything genuine. But such mind-numbing voyeuristic freak show TV replicates itself at an astounding rate. “Real Housewives of Paducah”?

I suppose the “Shark Tank” series on ABC is a kind of reality TV, so I feel a little embarrassed when I’m swimming by flipping channels and that show occasionally snags me. I’ve gotten hooked a few times.

On “Shark Tank” a panel of “sharks,” successful (whatever that is) business folks who have achieved the kind of amazing success (whatever that is) that we all are supposed to desire, listen to pitches by fledgling entrepreneurs hoping to enlist some serious denarii to take their businesses or business ideas onward and upward to serious success (whatever that is).

The “sharks” are brutal in their examination of the entrepreneurs and their products/ideas. But if the sharks are convinced that the pitch has merit, they’ll offer bunches of money to the entrepreneurs (and often compete or join with each other in doing so) to get the business funded or seriously expand it. In return, they get an agreed upon share in the company and a percentage of its income.

I’ll admit, it’s interesting to watch. The business ideas are interesting, as are the entrepreneurs themselves and the evaluation of the “sharks.” If I were starting a business, I hope I’d be open to frank counsel from someone who has successfully done so.

But swimming with sharks has some inherent dangers, and it brings up some questions.

I know our society always equates success with an impressive spreadsheet and “bigger and more.” Is that all it takes to be a “success”? Is there ever a time to wisely say, “Enough”?

If you’ve got a really great idea and your product is already selling pretty well, do you really want to get in bed with a shark? (Mixed metaphor, I know.) Can you ever really trust a shark? Is working with one much fun even if it produces more dollars? How much is happiness worth to you? Even if the shark is pretty honest, have you ever known a big personality/big money shark who didn’t always honestly think that any success in a joint venture was because of him and any setbacks because of his much less savvy partner(s)? Have you ever met a shark who wasn’t at least a little, and probably a lot, dangerous?

I wonder how many of these sharks bought their “success” with a long line of wrecked relationships and broken families? Is that a price you’d be willing to pay? Who and what are you willing to sacrifice on the altar of your “success”?

Our society’s definition of success is one thing; we do well to think long and hard about God’s definition. That’s a reality check you won’t find on “reality” TV.

Copyright 2012 by Curtis K. Shelburne. Permission to copy without altering text or for monetary gain is hereby granted subject to inclusion of this copyright notice.

To Beard or Not To Beard: That Is the Question

A gentleman by the name of Maynard Good Stoddard wrote an article for The Saturday Evening Post many moons ago which my brother, for some reason, sent my way. It is entitled “To Beard or Not To Beard.”

Mr. Stoddard said that one day he finally figured out why he had been pushed around at home for so many years. It was, he had discovered, because his chin lacked authority. He mentioned that he felt no need for one of those “Jay Leno jobs.” But he felt a definite need for something a bit more along that very distinctive line. It evidently occurred to him that though chin augmentation through plastic surgery might be pricey, whiskers are more or less free. And they do indeed change the character of a chin (and maybe even the chin of a character). A research project on beards was soon underway.

First, Stoddard polled his wife. She said she’d rather “embrace a camel’s hair pillow than a face full of whiskers,” a feeling evidently shared by a Mrs. Abner Billings (now a former Mrs. Billings) whose husband divorced her because she kept spraying his beard down with disinfectant which got into his eyes. The divorce court judge suggested “mowing the hay,” but Mr. Billings countered that the beard was more of a comfort to him than was Mrs. Billings.

According to Stoddard, “Beards have been causing domestic wars ever since wives discovered that whiskers could be mowed, shaven, or set on fire.”

And Stoddard discovered a good deal more in his research.

It was Alexander the Great who first “shot down the beard,” ordering his soldiers to shave lest their manly chins provide the enemy with convenient handholds.

A case could be made that by shaving his beard Louis VIII of France started a war with England that lasted 300 years. The beard-trimming was objected to by his wife, the famous Eleanor of Aquitaine. After their divorce, she married Henry II of England who had a beard he could “tuck into his belt on windy days.”

During the reign of Henry I, Serle the bishop, termed the bearded gents of the Norman English court “filthy goats and bristly Saracens.”

According to Stoddard’s research, Peter the Great levied a tax (“a sir-tax”?) on Russian beards. King Charles swept the points of his moustache upward and sported a beard shaped like a downward flame. Edward II’s beard was long and patriarchal. Henry VIII’s was knotted. The Roman Emperor Hadrian grew one to cover his warts.

Beards. I’m pretty sure that God, unlike most wives, is neutral on the subject. What comes out of our hearts is far more important to him than what graces or disgraces, as the case may be, our chins.

Copyright 2012 by Curtis K. Shelburne. Permission to copy without altering text or for monetary gain is hereby granted subject to inclusion of this copyright notice.

The God of the Universe Is Our Father

Christians are united as brothers and sisters spiritually by the very same  truth that makes siblings brothers and sisters physically—they have the same father (well, Father, in this case).

What an amazing blessing! God is our Father!

It is not simply that God gives us physical life, though he does, and in that sense God is the Father of everyone, but God is our Father in that he gives his believing children a new kind of life, a spiritual life which, unlike biological life, will never fade but is fit for eternity.

The two gifts of life, for which biblical Greek has two completely different words, are similar. Biological life and spiritual life look alike, but, as C. S. Lewis writes, they are actually as different as night and day. One is a photo of a place; the other, the real place. One is the statue of a human being; the other, the actual living person.

The business of Christianity is to impart to human beings genuine life, the life of God which comes only by grace through faith in Jesus Christ.

“This world,” Lewis writes, “is a great sculptor’s shop. We are the statues and there is a rumour going round the shop that some of us are some day going to come to life.”

The difference, you see, between mere biological life and spiritual life is the difference between a “carved stone” and a living, breathing human.

Our God is the greatest King, but it was no royal nobility which caused him to send his Son to give real life to you and to me.

Our God is the most powerful Judge, but no legal demands of any law—and certainly no merit on our part—obligated him to freely extend life and mercy to any of us.

Our God is the most masterful Creator, but nothing in his great creative energy forced him to fashion sons and daughters out of statues.

But thank God himself that God is also our Father, and out of his deep Father’s love for his children he extends to us freely the blessings of genuine life, life fashioned to be able to experience an eternity of Joy.

No description of God is as expressive or beautiful or full of meaning as this: God is our Father.

 

Copyright 2012 by Curtis K. Shelburne. Permission to copy without altering text or for monetary gain is hereby granted subject to inclusion of this copyright notice.

Just Thinking About "Time in a Bottle"

“What is a grain of wheat?” Paul Tournier asks. “It contains a whole plant you cannot yet see. What is a silkworm? You cannot define it without seeing in advance all its metamorphosis. What is a child? You cannot describe him without thinking of the whole life of the man, with all its unknowns, for which he is preparing.”

As I first read those words years ago, I sat at my desk and examined the little Christmas present I had just received from my mother. It was a simple little thing—a small bottle with a glass stopper. Inside were ten or fifteen marbles. She’d tied a thin baby blue ribbon around the little bottle.

Once it was a vitamin bottle, but now it was becoming a very special paperweight. I remembered the marbles, every one. They were mine, or at least they had been.

The bottle? The bottle once sat on the small table by my aged maternal grandparents’ bed in the old house at Robert Lee, Texas. It had held just enough water to use to take a pill or to wet a dry throat.

Dr. Tournier writes of the metamorphosis, the transformation, we see when caterpillars are changed into butterflies and blonde-headed little boys into graying grandfathers. That little bottle is for me an appropriate symbol of the process. Nestled inside the glass bottle of the aged are the glass trinkets of childhood. Thus encapsulated by a marble-filled bottle is the whole spectrum of life from spring to winter, from youth to old age.

No one is immune to the metamorphosis wrought by time. With each tick of the clock every one of us is being transformed. Tournier is right. We see a small child and wonder what the adult will be like. We wonder about the many unknowns life holds for graduates walking across the stage. We each, no matter what our age, remember what we ourselves have been and ponder what we may yet become. The present flits into the past on the wings of a hyperactive hummingbird, and we are powerless to slow it down or grasp it into stillness. The future races to meet us with blinding speed, oppressed with such a low opinion of itself that it can’t wait to change its name to “The Past.”

But Christians needn’t be frightened of the frenetic future or paralyzed by the echoes of the past. We are all being changed, but God’s children know that the transformation can be filled with joy and hope. Our Creator promises to lovingly fill our lives with His life, continually re-creating us by Resurrection power, changing us “into Christ’s likeness from one degree of glory to another” (2 Corinthians 3:18).





Copyright 2012 by Curtis K. Shelburne. Permission to copy without altering text or for monetary gain is hereby granted subject to inclusion of this copyright notice.

Freedom Is a Costly and Precious Gift

I am writing this column on a beautiful and calm morning. It’s a holiday, and I’m planning to be seriously involved in doing almost nothing serious today.

I’ve watered the fresh concrete in my driveway, trying to help it cure slowly and hoping to get it to grow. So far, that’s worked.

I’m sitting on the back patio, life-giving coffee and a deadly pellet gun on the table by my side. The coffee? Well, everyone knows it’s foolish to try to write without coffee. And the pellet gun? Well, grackles occasionally show up to try to eat my dog food and chase off civilized birds. I’ve heard some of those nasty grackle-birds are endangered. I doubt it, but with all of my heart, I hope so. They’ll be more endangered if my aim is good today.

Today is Memorial Day. It’s a special day when we especially remember the sacrifice of those who have risked, and many lost, their lives and liberty to keep us free. To remember means to think.

Being still and enjoying time like this is something we should do more of. Thinking tends to happen on the rare occasions when we stop “doing” long enough to think about what we’re doing and why we’re doing it.

As I was thinking some this morning about those who have given life and liberty to safeguard the life and liberty which are God’s gifts to us, I thought of a short radio speech given almost 90 years ago in England.

Winston Churchill was talking about “The Causes of War.” He said that many people are convinced that the best way to avoid war is to “dwell upon its horrors,” to spend a lot of time talking about and focusing visually and rhetorically on the horrible cost of war in bloodshed and suffering. Yes, he said, such focus may indeed have genuine value in keeping civilized people from invading and subjugating other nations.

But it is very little help at all when rogue nations with power hungry and blood-thirsty leaders attack others. As we now know, to endlessly negotiate with a Hitler is as effective on the world scene as giving moving speeches on the playground to the school bully. Bullies like to talk. It gives them more time to brutalize the weak, and is very encouraging to them as it proves beyond any doubt the weakness of the speaker.

Oh, yes, Churchill allowed, it’s a fine thing to remind ourselves never to attack and pillage other peace-loving nations and to negotiate solutions to reasonable differences with other civilized nations.

But how do you effectively deal with nations who laugh at the idea of freedom and whose brutal and truly evil leaders gobble up and enslave nation after nation? Very differently.

Freedom is God’s gift to us, and it is precious. Thank God for all those, and their families, who have paid a very real price so that we can live in a land with mornings like this one.







Copyright 2012 by Curtis K. Shelburne. Permission to copy without altering text or for monetary gain is hereby granted subject to inclusion of this copyright notice.

It's No Secret: I Love the Church!

I love the church! Not just (just?) the church universal, that marvelous and miraculous Body of Christ composed of all God’s children, everyone who ever has or ever will wear Christ’s name, all the sons and daughters of God . . . Oh, I love “that” church, too.

But I also love the local expressions of that Body, the little bands of disciples—all of them small indeed compared to the grand Body from which they spring—working in a million places to glorify God and share Christ’s love. I love the church.

Oh, I know, loving the church is not always in style. Lots of “Baby Boomers” like me, sentenced to too much time in the 60s and 70s, find it hard to trust any institution. (And it IS unwise to completely trust the human side of even a divine institution.) Some folks, also like me, grew up in “separatist” traditions or groups who tended to talk more about “the church” than they did about the Lord of the church.

For lots of reasons, it’s easy to lose respect for the church as seen in her all-too-human local expressions. Some lose respect for the church in general because many churches are small, and our culture only respects “large.” Some folks point to little churches that seem short-sighted and poorly “run.” And some are. Some lose respect because some large churches seem so plastic and choreographed that they feel fake. Yes, and some are, and could put on a fine show without God at all.

And we all know that when bad things happen in the church, the spectacle is particularly unseemly. When a church gets caught up in power struggles all dressed up as pious piffle, or divides and walls itself off from the rest of the Body over molehills of supposed “doctrine” masquerading as mountains . . . When “issues” prance around like the old naked emperor with no clothes, most sensible folks (in the church or outside it) see how bad that looks. It’s like a hairy wart on Miss America’s nose or, sadder still, a cow patty dropped on top of a luscious cheesecake. It’s all the more ugly because we know how beautiful it can and should be.

But I still love the church. I’ve seen her beauty. I’ve felt the warmth of her embrace and seen the depth of her love, and the very best blessings of my life have been gifts from the Lord given through her hands.

I love the church, and I love the little church I’m a part of, and I hope you love yours. Through our doors and into our “family” have come F-16 pilots and janitors, 4-pound newborns and 103-year-old little ladies, teachers and farmers and brand new parents and brand new great-grandparents and . . . Well, an amazingly diverse group of folks!

Each Sunday young families do the hard work of rounding up and dressing up the precious little rug-rats and heading through these doors. Much older folks navigate via walker and wheelchair to these pews. Folks in every stage of life between infancy and antiquity come in to honor their Lord, to be a blessing and to receive a blessing.

And yet again I am amazed at what the Lord of the church does in the lives of his people.

I love the church!





Copyright 2012 by Curtis K. Shelburne. Permission to copy without altering text or for monetary gain is hereby granted subject to inclusion of this copyright notice.

God's People Are "More Than Conquerors"

When St. Paul stakes with words God’s claim of sovereignty over the circumstances of our lives and proclaims the Almighty’s promise of ever-present and never-failing love, the great apostle does so with his eyes wide open.

“What can separate us from the love of Christ?” he asks, and when he lists among the weapons of the enemy, “trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword,” his list is much more than hypothetical. These are the words of a man who has opened his eyes on many mornings and seen these very darts of Satan aimed ominously in his direction.

Long before Peter Jackson’s breathtaking motion picture trilogy captivated the hearts of theatre audiences, The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien was my all-time favorite book. (Tolkien thought of it as one but the publisher thought one massive volume would be massively daunting to readers, and it became three books). I’d far rather spend one day in a hobbit hole with Frodo Baggins than a week in a mansion with any king or president or head of state I can think of.

Some of my favorite lines in the first of the trilogy’s books, The Fellowship of the Ring, are these as the faithful dwarf Gimli comments to the king of the elves: “Faithless is he that says farewell when the road darkens.” And Elrond the king answers, “Maybe, but let him not vow to walk in the dark, who has not seen the nightfall.”

The Apostle Paul had seen the nightfall. He’d seen trouble, hardship, persecution, and all the rest. He’d been on the receiving end of the very worst of Satan’s weapons. And that makes his resounding affirmation of faith all the more impressive and trustworthy. No empty words, his.

Paul had indeed seen the nightfall, but still he writes with utter confidence, not in his own strength but in the strength of his King: “No, in all these things, we are more than conquerors through him who loved us.” Nothing in all creation can separate us from the love of God!

God’s people are more than conquerors even in the midst of tragedy when tears seem to be more constant than any other companion. God wraps us up in a Father’s embrace in the midst of our tears, and the Almighty cries with us. Remember Jesus’ tears before the tomb of Lazarus?

God’s people are more than conquerors even as they are lying flat on their backs wracked with the pain of physical disease because they know that through Christ all pain and suffering will one day be forever banished and, even now, the disease that can kill our bodies can never kill souls filled with God’s genuine life, and one day death itself will forever die.

God’s people are more than conquerors, and nothing in all of creation or beyond can take away the victory that is ours in Christ Jesus.







Copyright 2012 by Curtis K. Shelburne. Permission to copy without altering text or for monetary gain is hereby granted subject to inclusion of this copyright notice.

This Fallen World Is Out of Kilter, But One Day . . .

“The Online Etymology Dictionary.”

That’s the name of a website I discovered recently. No, it’s not a site devoted to knowledge about bugs. That’s “entomology.” Etymology is indeed a “-logy” so it’s “the science of” something. But not creepy-crawlies. Etymology is the science of word derivations. The site’s owners describe it as “a map of the wheel-ruts of modern English.” Nicely put.

I’m glad somebody created such a site. I’m imagining them as a group of under-appreciated, underpaid, societally under-valued, mildly depressive but devoted English majors who are also afflicted with the kind of itch history helps scratch.

Even for a society on technological steroids, it’s probably good to keep around a few of the old fossils just described. Math and science folks help us know how to go really fast and do cool stuff. Humanities folks help answer pesky questions about which direction we’re going and what cool stuff is worth doing (and where there’ve been wrecks we maybe should avoid).

I feel better just knowing that the Online Etymology Dictionary is available and doing good work for humanity. It’d be a shame for some fine old English words and phrases to be lost or orphaned and nobody know from whence they came. Sometimes a phrase comes along and just begs you to try to meet its parents by following the wheel ruts back up the road a bit. I was grabbed by just such a phrase recently, and that’s when I discovered this site.

If something is “out of working order or alignment,” “out of order,” “not in good condition,” we might say, “It’s out of whack.” But we’re just as likely to say, “It’s out of kilter.” We know what that means. But why does it mean what it means? What, pray tell, is the “kilter” something might be “out of”?

My money was on “kilter” being an old nautical term. I like old nautical terms. But no. Or maybe a surveyor’s or navigator’s term. Nope.

I learned that the phrase first shows up in the 1620’s. “Kilter” is a variant of the English “kelter” which pops up around 1600 and means “good condition, order.”

 But why does it mean that? The word was sired somewhere! You never met a word without some verbal ancestors. Alas, this one is short on birth records. That’s too bad, because it’s a cool word and part of a great phrase. It’s a shame Al Gore wasn’t around to invent the Internet a few hundred years earlier. Maybe if the Online Etymology Dictionary had been around a good bit longer, a good phrase wouldn’t be so sadly orphaned and, just maybe, the world would be a little less “out of kilter.”

 I hope you’re not feeling “out of kilter.” Yes, we live in an “out of kilter” world. But we can thank our Father for the gift he gave to be sure that one day, pure joy and complete goodness and order will reign, and nothing and nobody will ever again be out of . . .

Well, you know.

Copyright 2012 by Curtis K. Shelburne. Permission to copy without altering text or for monetary gain is hereby granted subject to inclusion of this copyright notice.

No One Erects Statues to Honor Critics

In an old issue of Leadership Journal, Haddon Robinson retells the story of a very talented young musician who was crestfallen as he sat reading the critics’ reviews of his recent concert. The negative words stung his soul like fire. It was an older and more accomplished musician, the famous Finnish composer Jean Sibelius, who comforted the young man by patting him on the back and remarking, “Remember, son, there is no city in the world where they have erected a statue to a critic.”

Maybe that’s at least partly what Jesus was saying with his well-known words from what we know as the Sermon on the Mount: “Do not judge, or you too will be judged. For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you” (Matthew 7:1-3).

J. B. Phillips, in his paraphrase, just puts it this way: “Don’t criticize people, and you will not be criticized.”

That’s hard, isn’t it? But it says something we need to hear.

We’re all familiar with Jesus’ words, but we easily push them to the backs of our minds when we take up the role of critic. We allow ourselves to become the self-appointed judges of our neighbor next door or our co-worker on the job or the lady sitting on the other side of the pew. Criticism, you see, is the most common form of judging.

But Jesus makes fun of judges like us: “Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and fail to notice the 2 X 4 plank in your own?”

It’s one thing to offer kindly advice to someone we’re charged to teach or train (and someone who has also regularly received our genuine encouragement and affirmation): “I really appreciate the work that you do. Have you ever thought about how this particular part of your work could be more effective?”

It’s another to spend all of our time looking down our noses at others and appraising them with jaundiced eyes, quick to offer criticism, spoken aloud or not, but “donating” encouragement about as often as we donate kidneys.

The eye, Jesus says, is “the window of the body.” If I’m looking at the world through dark glasses, I shouldn’t be surprised if the whole world takes on a dark hue. It’s altogether too easy for me to become the self-appointed judge of everyone and everything around me. I sit up in the reviewing stand watching the world go by and writing down the marks I award to each person who parades by for my inspection. Without the benefit of a court or Presidential appointment, and certainly no divine mandate, I ascend to the cardboard bench of my own making and judge while the world goes by.

For most of us, judging ourselves should be task enough.



Copyright 2012 by Curtis K. Shelburne. Permission to copy without altering text or for monetary gain is hereby granted subject to inclusion of this copyright notice.

Real Joy Is Found in the Presence of Heaven's Prince

I guess I need to see an Eye, Ears, Nose & Throat specialist. Or maybe a neurologist. I keep getting things stuck in my head.

I got a frog stuck in my throat at the end of a recent sermon. (Better for it to hop in at the end than the beginning.) Allergies, I think. Exacerbated by the fact that it never rains here anymore.

I often get songs stuck up there. Sometimes they’re really good ones. But the more pernicious the song, the longer it seems to stay stuck in my cranium. Stuff like “Achy Breaky Heart” pops in unbidden. Or the theme song of hell: “I Did It My Way.” (Great. Now it’s back.)

Sometimes literary quotations get stuck up there, too. Maybe I read the book this week. Or maybe three decades ago. But a quotation jumps into my brain and starts bumping around.

The way to replace songs lodged in my head is to listen to some music I love and replace the stuck stuff. And the way to get the quotation dislodged is to write about it and/or get busy reading something else.

This morning the dismal words of poet Charles Swinburne (1837-1909) in his “Hymn to Proserpine” began replaying in my head, and I will now proceed to remove them.

In the poem Swinburne ruminates on what a “philosophic” pagan might have felt as Christianity had become the official religion of the Roman Empire (declared so by the Emperor Constantine in 313). Constantine’s nephew, Emperor Julian the Apostate, died in 363, the last non-Christian ruler of the Roman Empire. Julian had wanted to take the Empire back to the “good ol’ days” when paganism ruled unbridled and being a Roman was fun (my phrasing). The death-bed “last words” attributed to Julian (probably falsely) were, “You have conquered, Galilean.”

Thus Swinburne writes, “Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean; the world has grown grey from thy breath.”

That view could hardly be more mistaken, but I think I understand why some adopt it. Real “holiness” is never loud. Real piety has no need to be pretentious or “self-conscious” at all. Spend much time with folks more sanctimonious than sanctified, whose “holiness” could well be described as condescending, tiresome, persnickety, frenetic, manipulative, boring, burdensome, unsmiling, self-righteous . . . and you can count on your world quickly going grey as all the life is chased away. (God help us not to be those folks!)

But spend time getting to really know the Galilean, and you’ll find eye-popping color, the richest laughter, the deepest joy even in the midst of sorrow, and a genuine breadth and quality of wide-awake life that will dwarf your best dreams of what real life could ever be.

Maybe Emperor Julian longed for the good ol’ days when Bacchus, the god of revelry, and his ilk held sway. But the real joy found in the presence of Heaven’s true Prince is enough to make Bacchus blush and go pale forever.








Copyright 2012 by Curtis K. Shelburne. Permission to copy without altering text or for monetary gain is hereby granted subject to inclusion of this copyright notice.

Two Princesses Lead an Old Troll to Wonder and Joy

I don’t know exactly when most of us trade our imaginations for calculators, but it happens far too early, and it is a very bad trade.

Once the deal is done, we spend far too many of our days wandering through life with our eyes half-closed, our spirits half asleep, dull and insensible, so witless that we barely notice the grievous loss. But sometimes a beautiful glimpse of the wonder we once had by the overflowing bucket-load takes us back to what is precious.

I think that’s what happened to me on a wonder-filled Easter evening. In the afterglow of the most wonderful Resurrection of all came a much more modest but still “wonder-full” resurrection of my spirit right in our back yard.

Two granddaughter-princesses, five years old and three, and a little eleven-month-young elf, were spending the weekend with us.

“PawPaw,” the princesses begged, “tell us a scary story!”

That presented a bit of a problem. First, my 55-year-old imagination is old and withered and can’t possibly keep up with theirs! I also have a 55-year-old back that soon became a factor. Plus, there’s scary and there’s SCARY. It’s a fine thing when magic seeds sprout into bean-stalks but no grandpa worth his salt wants scary story seeds to sprout into nightmares.

But we got started. In the shed/greenhouse, I sat in my chair and the princesses sat in their little “frog” chairs. I reached back into my own childhood for a story, but I soon found that all I had to do was get things started.

“Once upon a time, two princesses left their fine castle and started out for the forest. Their names were . . . Hmm, I’m trying to remember . . .”

“Alexandria!” shouted the older. “Belle!” interjected the younger.

And off we went. I provided some basic details and the princesses filled in the rest, bouncing up now and again to draw the story in chalk on the shed floor. A bridge. A troll. A witch. Cookies with enchanted sprinkles (because princesses don’t always eat the whole cookie but they always eat the icing and sprinkles). And a rescue by Kings Chris & Jeff and Queens Shayla & Amy. We went all the way to “happily ever after.”

Later in the day, the story moved to the trampoline, a tale my back still tells wordlessly. A troll looking much like me discovered that though princesses on trampolines are invisible, they are not inaudible or inedible. If you bounce them a bit, they soon start giggling and then you can find them and eat their tummies.

As the day was ending, Princess Number One made me promise to tell them another story about the Muleshoe Scare. It is evidently quite a well-known scary story, but I don’t know it yet. I promised to tell it when they come back, so I’m working on it.

“Here at the magic hour,” sings Andrew Peterson, “Time and eternity / Mingle a moment in chorus.” I think we found the magic hour. But I’d never have found it alone. It took two little girls (and a little elf) on Easter to take me by the hand and lead me to it. Yes, indeed, “a little child shall lead them.” No wonder the Lord of all wonder so loved the little ones! They remind us of what really matters. They lead us to Joy.





Copyright 2012 by Curtis K. Shelburne. Permission to copy without altering text or for monetary gain is hereby granted subject to inclusion of this copyright notice.

"The Most Expensive Hyphen in History"

“The Most Expensive Hyphen in History.”

That was the title I ran across in a Google search as I was editing and designing a recent issue of The Christian Appeal, the monthly devotional magazine my brother and I edit.

The “hyphen” in question was actually an “overbar” (“hyphen” to most of us) that a programmer failed to properly copy into “coded computer instructions” in the “data editing program” that allowed faulty guidance instructions to be sent to . . . guess what? A space probe! None other than NASA’s Mariner 1.

Launched in 1962, Mariner 1 was supposed to head for Venus for America’s first planetary “fly by.” Unfortunately for the 18.2 million dollar (1962 dollars!) spacecraft, the missing hyphen caused such serious guidance problems that the spacecraft had to be destroyed just 294.5 seconds into the flight. (Mariner 2 would later do the job right.)

The whole hyphen incident seems to have taken on something of “urban legend” status, clouding fact and fiction. But Mariner 1 did indeed become expensive toast, and, though the reality may well be more complicated, a single hyphen has often received the blame.

So, you see, the moral of the story is clearly that, while computer programmers are a dime a gigabyte, what the world really needs are more conscientious English majors with a flare for proofreeding. (Make that “a flair for proofreading,” lest this column go off-course and crash into innocent bystanders.)

I hate proofreading, but what I hate worse is wading through slop published by careless proofreaders. Our little magazine gets proofread at least four times before it hits print. I dare anyone to find a cleaner publication (in any sense). But it still drives me crazy when I’m reading through an issue later and am hit in the face by an extra space that managed to creep in and hitch a ride to publication between two words that needed only one space.

Grammar is another issue, and one that recently almost caused a rift in the family. (You need to understand that my family plays Scrabble as blood sport.) My younger brother Jim wrote the sentence. Editor Me passed it on. Older brother Editor Gene flagged it to be fixed. Here’s the original: “I’ve become acutely aware of the chaos so many ‘loose ends’ tends to create.” The question: “tends” or “tend”? It’s a subject-verb agreement issue. Brother Jim thinks “chaos” is doing the tending. Brother Gene thinks the “loose ends” tend. I just tend to be confused, but I bowed to seniority and went with “tend.” I just hope the issue doesn’t go off course and blow up if that’s wrong.

Mistakes do creep in, don’t they? In print. And, heaven knows, in life. Thank God that he didn’t forget to cross the most important T. We call it the Cross. The gift of God’s Son. Truly amazing GRACE. And, yes, that’s supposed to be all caps. (But Gene says italics would’ve been better.)





Copyright 2012 by Curtis K. Shelburne. Permission to copy without altering text or for monetary gain is hereby granted subject to inclusion of this copyright notice.