It was the Greek philosopher Heraclitus, not the Bible, that said “Change is the only constant in life.” He said that in the time of Isaiah! That was 500 years before Jesus, when, in my mind, things didn’t change that much. We quote Heraclitus nowadays because so much changes. And in a post-Einstein world, we kind of think that everything changes, even our understanding of the truth, that everything is relative. And that everything changes. There are no constants that we can count on.

But even Einstein believed in constants. Remember that famous equation E=mC2? The C of that equation stands for Constant. Light, as far as Einstein was concerned, is constant. The Bible nods its head at that idea too.

Physics suggests that there are several constants. Look up Planck’s Constant – it’s fascinating. And incredibly precise. The constant speed of light is likewise precisely measured: 186,000 miles per second to be exact.

    The pull of gravity is also understood to be constant, but that figure has been elusive. A physicist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Gaithersburg, Maryland by the name of Stephan Schlamminger has spent the last 10 years trying to ascertain that number, and the number he has come up with is different from everybody else’s ideas. Even the experiment that he was trying to replicate. Bless his heart. He called his endeavor “life-sucking.” You’ve got to feel sorry for a guy that spends 10 years of his life on an experiment that essentially failed.

      If something is constant, how in the world can you not measure it? I’m sure Dr. Schlamminger has asked himself the same question for the last 10 years. I don’t have the answer to that; he suggests that gravity is the weakest of the four fundamental forces, and… yeah, it got a little foggy for me after that.

      I don’t think, as he does, that just because you can’t measure it doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist. Just because you can’t figure it out doesn’t mean it’s not true. Wait. Say that again…. Just because you can’t figure something out doesn’t mean that it’s not true. That is true for the tests and measures around gravity, but it’s true in the spiritual life as well. I will never understand how my mom lived as long as she did without food and water. Nor how her illness did not cause her pain. But her life during those months was real, and redemptive for me, and for many. Incredible, real things happened in those days.

      The inability to figure things out does not equate to failure. Schlamminger described his testing as a long walk through a dark valley (which has echoes of Psalm 23). Life leads all of us through some “valley of the shadow of death.” Those valleys feel like failures, and very well may be, but they do not mean the end, or that God is not with us. Psalm 37:23-24 says: “The Lord makes firm the steps of the one who delights in him; though he falls, he shall not be cast headlong, for the Lord upholds his hand.”

     I can give witness to that truth. Not all has gone well for me. My body has failed in rather catastrophic ways, for instance. And yet I can say that the Lord has made firm my steps, and though I have fallen, the Lord has been graceful to let me get up again, and again. A failed 10-year endeavor to come up with a number has to be tough, but not the end.

      And one last word. My experience of, and my trust in, gravity is unaffected by Schlamminger’s testing. When I put my cup down on the table, it still stays there, even if we don’t know precisely the force that keeps it from floating away. The constant is not invalidated by the lack of measurement. God told Micah: I the Lord do not change (Micah 3:6). Even though Heraclitus’ dictum seems true, it ultimately is not. God is constant. God does not change. God will always be faithful. You can count on that (pun intended).

Craig

This is the message we have heard from him and declare to you: God is light; in him there is no darkness at all. 1 John 1:5 (NIV)

  Trying to sleep at the end of a Hospice bed is kind of interesting. At least with this bed that they brought into my mother’s house, they install an articulated blue air mattress and then hang its pump on the end of the bed. Her comfy recliner ended up at the foot of that bed.

      As pumps go, it’s fairly quiet, but in the dark corners of the night you can definitely hear it. The perpetual drone of the pump can serve as white noise, a constant hum that nullifies the creaks and the cracks of the home settling for the night (and maybe some lingering conversations in your head).  But the mattress itself makes its own sounds as it pumps up or releases air, that brilliant breathing-like design of this hospital bed.

      If you’re sleeping at the end of the bed, it means that they didn’t bring the bed for you, and you are probably there because you love the person who is in it. For me, that would be my mother. My mother has moved with the ebb and flow of this mattress for three weeks now, three weeks longer than any expert (or amateur) ever thought.

       Somewhere near that end of the hospice bed your prayers change. You stop praying for that person, whom you love dearly, to get better, and you start praying that the Lord would let them go. In my mother’s case, that’s all she wants. All she wants is to go be with her Savior, a God that she has served all her life, a Lord that she firmly believes in with every now small inch of her being.

       At the end of the hospice bed, now with the sun shining through the living room window, conversations happen. Family gathers. Stories are told. Family stories are clarified and refined. Past blessings and hurts and questions get rehearsed and, again, clarified and sometimes healed. Forgiveness and perspective are given and received at the end of the hospice bed.

      There’s nothing decorous about the end of the bed. It’s not a desirable piece of furniture. But I’m glad it’s here, and that I am here. The comfy recliner next to the droning pump has been a place of conversation, but also of observation of my Mom. There I have sat and looked way beyond the now glassy eyes on my mother’s face, and into the collective memories of a mother and her son.  Like the rituals of having dinner every night with my Dad, but then just her and me doing the dishes. Every night, all week, every month for all the years that I could reach up to get dishes out of the stainer to dry, we talked and processed and bonded. I can’t say that I miss doing the dishes, but I now will forever miss those conversations that wiped clean more than dishes.

       It was at the end of the bed that I stood and prayed and said goodbye for the last time. There were tears, the tears of two brothers now hugging each other for consolation instead of her, and it was at that moment, when my brother leaned over to kiss her, that she produced the final liquid her body had, a small tear in her right eye. For all the sedation and the decline of all her abilities, her last gesture, without being able to talk or to move or even see, was to share a tear. One tear that became a torrent for me, tears of grief, but now that she’s finally let go, of gratitude. I am eternally grateful for that little girl from Altoona, PA who became a wife, then a missionary, then my Mom. She ended well. I will strive to do the same.

Carol Emily Nelson October 13, 1938 – April 25, 2026

                    If you wander about these parts we call downtown Boca much (which if you read this article, you probably do), you know that we have railroad tracks. Unfortunately for me, we, like the majority of people that call Boca home, live “on the other side of the tracks.”  Now, Old Floresta and Boca Winds and The Shores hardly qualify for the traditional understanding of “the other side of the tracks,” but, we do have to cross them. And since the advent of Brightline, the odds that you will be stuck waiting for a train has gone from “probably not” having to stop to “probably so.”  Particularly if you add the myriads of “ghost” trains that go through – the times the gates go down but nothing goes by. That’s a new rendition of “the lights are on, but nobody’s home.”

      The other day I saw something new waiting at the railroad tracks. Right there on Palmetto Park, a Brightline train roared northbound (I don’t think it was stopping in Boca), and a Florida East Coast Railway (FEC) freight train rumbled south. It was kind of exciting and interesting to watch them barrel past each other, a blur of color and light. It reminded me of a time Janice and I were riding a high-speed train in Spain, barreling down the tracks at 120-plus mph, when a train doing equal or greater speed passed us going the other direction. Blur doesn’t begin to describe that passing!

      Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s image of two ships passing in the night conjures a much more romantic image than the freight train in Boca. But that sense of missing connections still remained for me as I watched these two trains. Our lives get so full of demands (or perceived demands) on our time that we rush past a lot of beauty, goodness, and truth (to cite the transcendentals). We rush from one thing to another, yes trying to “stay in our lane” (two trains crashed on that same line Janice and I were on in Spain a couple of months ago), but in so doing we miss visiting with people, enjoying things that God has placed along the way, and losing ourselves in our own truths, instead of The Truth.

       In traffic, in the isles of Costco or Publix, in life, like the two trains at the RR crossing, I rush past too many people, too many opportunities for God to pour into me, and maybe pour into others. In slowing down, the transcendentals can pour in. Can we go slow enough to at least say hi to each other?

Waiting for the gates to go up,

Craig

Those who are kind benefit themselves,
but those who go too fast bring ruin on themselves. Proverbs 11:17

                     If you’ve known me for any amount of time, you know that I grew up in Costa Rica, and that I am partial to that country. I had a great upbringing there. So, when Costa Rica hits the news here in the States, I naturally gravitate towards it. And Costa Rica made the paper this week.

     It was an immigration piece. It turns out that among the many countries the US is farming out its immigrants to, Costa Rica receives 25 a week. And from all over the world. What does a small country like that do with all of them? Well, some get repatriated, but recently they have been released into the general population to mostly fend for themselves. And in this article, the writer highlighted a particular group that is reaching out to those folks.

     As a young boy growing up, we had the choice of two brands of cheese. One was from the company that kind of had a monopoly on milk. Ice cream, sour cream, yogurt, and yes, cheese, mostly came from this company. But then came along this other product called Monteverde (“Green Mountain” in Spanish). It was a little more upscale, and very good, and so I thought it was really cool when my Dad told me, as a teenager, that we were going to go there. Well, that trip was a car ride, a bush plane ride, and then a long horse ride to get to our first destination. Somebody was trying to bamboozle my Dad into buying some incredibly remote land… that’s another story. But we got to Monteverde via the back mountains, and there I found an English-speaking community of farmers, beating back the forest enough to feed cows and make this delectable cheese. 

     These were Quakers. Not Amish. Not Mennonites. But Quakers, who are fiercely independent (fierce is not a good adjective for this group, but descriptive all the same), and deeply committed to their expression of Christianity. Their faith calls them to a simple lifestyle, deep pacifism, and quiet worship. I learned to admire them as a kid. And I still do. Those people, recognized in the article I was reading as Americans deep in the mountains and committed Christians, had opened their homes, their community, their hearts to these sojourning strangers who were rejected by the US, and in many cases their own countries. I found this gesture to be awesome, but not remarkable. I found it to be incredibly consistent with the people I met so long ago (and have visited since – including a Friends Meeting on Sunday morning). I admire them for a lot more than the great cheese they continue to make.

       How does that spiritual go? And they’ll know we are Christians by our love, by our love…. I want to make sure that I am known as somebody who loves the homeless person walking Mizner, for loving the young person who walks through our doors on Sunday, for loving the person with a flat tire on the side of the road and the one fleeing their home country because of one reason or another.

       Jesus modelled that for us. As did those Christian Americans up in Northwest Costa Rica.

Mine is to follow.

Let us walk with each other, let us walk hand in hand…

Craig

“They also will answer, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or sick or in prison, and did not help you?’ “He will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for  one of the least of these, you did not do for me.’  Matthew 25:44,45 (NIV)

                     The Guiness Book of World Records – I actually had one of those once. And truthfully, I didn’t think they published them anymore. I thought it was all online. But a quick search on eBay shows that for $22.00 you can buy a 2026 version, and for $10.00 buy one from 1976. I enjoyed reading the records of the tallest person, or the fastest car, or the largest animal in that bicentennial year. Now in our sestercentennial year, I only read about records online, usually in a back-page article in the news. Yes, in the last 50 years The Guiness Book of World Records chronicles not silly records necessarily, but shall we say, “creative” records. Like recently, a 90-year-old woman by the name of Ann Crile Esselstyn got in the book for holding a dead hang position for 2 minutes and 56 seconds, hanging with her bare hands from a horizontal pipe she had hung from the ceiling in a bedroom. Speaking of nonagenarians, an Australian man just got into the book for being the oldest person to become a grandparent for the first time, at 92 years and 209 days old. For those of you who are still waiting – there’s hope!

          And for the most “creative” right now? An Arkansas woman got in the book for wearing the most T-shirts in a half-marathon. OK. “How many?” you might ask. 55. “Why?” you might ask next. Well, she says to replicate the weight she has lost running for the last 17 years. I don’t know how much those 55 T-shirts weighed, and I don’t know what the rest of the 54 white T-shirts said, but the 55^th one simply read “Colossians 3:12.”

      Colossians 3:12 reads: “Therefore, as God’s chosen people, holy and dearly loved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience.” I love that! Usually, you see people putting references up like John 3:16, or some other evangelistic verse. Meredith Smith, this woman from Arkansas, chose to ask us for kindness and gentleness. I think this should be the rallying call of Americans right now. Particularly in the United States today, Christians should call one another, not other people, to be compassionate, and kind, and humble, and gentle, and patient. That verse addresses Christians. It says, “as God’s chosen people.”  That would be us.

        Now, compared to some of the violent rhetoric we hear in the national news, we can easily say we’re not doing that. But I think God would call all of us to recall the conversations we have more locally – with our family and friends, and our Christian brothers and sisters. Would others characterize our words, all our words, as compassionate and kind? That’s what the apostle Paul calls us to in that letter to the Colossians. That’s what the Lord is calling us to, as American Christians.

Let’s work on it.

Trying to think of something to get me into that record book,

Craig

Finally, all of you be of one mind, having compassion for one another;
love as brothers, be tenderhearted, be courteous. 1 Peter 3:8 (NKJB)

              My parents designed and built a very modest (there was a half-inch gap between the front door and the floor, for instance) modular home in Costa Rica. It wasn’t fancy, but it was ours, and the next-door neighbors had a boy my age who became my good friend. I loved that house. The other day my Mom had us bring out four boxes of mementos from those years, a trip down memory lane that lasted several hours.

As you entered that very drafty front door, on the right was a low bookcase filled with a growing set of National Geographic magazines, various other books (you would find the World Book collection on another bookcase), and a guestbook. I always thought it awkward to ask people to leave a register of their presence at our house back then, now, I think it was brilliant.

          I didn’t flip though that little book. I ran my finger over each name, as if that would give me some physical contact with those people. So many people. A LOT of people came through our house. College students coming for Bible study. Missionaries coming for social gatherings. Family from the US. School friends of mine coming as adults to visit. People that I haven’t thought about in 50 years. People that were precious to us then, people that have indelible marks on me now.

          The book humbled me for a couple of reasons. One is that I didn’t remember that book at all through my own adult life, and hence we don’t have one. And two, my guest list would not be as large. Well… I don’t know, but still, the pages of that book created a “cloud of witnesses” (as the apostle Paul might call them) that flooded my memories and filled the house as I recalled some of them to my Mom and brother.

          From the book of Revelation, we learn that there is a “Book of Life.”  This book is inferred from the words of Jesus who said, “rejoice because your names are written in heaven” (Luke 10:20b). My image of that book is directly informed by that guest book on the bookshelf by the front door of our home in Costa Rica. It’s not so much that we get to the gates of Heaven and St. Peter checks to see if God got around to writing our names in it like a guest list, but more that what St. Peter finds is my signature, my recording of my presence in the Kingdom. God invites us all to the party, but not all of us accept the invitation. (Remember the parable of the Wedding Banquet in Matthew 22?)  Some of us are too busy. Some of us RSVP but then don’t show up. I think the Book of Life is more akin to my parents’ guest book than the posted roster of those who made the final cut for the football team.

           Is your name written in the Book of Life? Mine is. I first signed it years ago, whether it was when I prayed the Sinner’s Prayer with my Dad, or when he baptized me, or when I went to camp and delighted in the proximity with the eternal. I don’t know when I first signed that book, but I know I can hardly recognize the penmanship it was so long ago.
          

Is your name in the Book?

Reminiscing,

Craig

P.S. This is NOT an announcement about signing the Connect Card. ��

“He who overcomes shall be clothed in white garments, and I will not blot out his name from the Book of Life; but I will confess his name before My Father and before His angels.” Revelation 3:5 (NKJV)

      A couple of weeks ago I had the privilege of taking a group from our church to Orlando. I intended the trip to provide folks from the church a glimpse of the Children’s Home, a ministry of the United Methodist Church in Florida aimed at helping at risk children. They call it Residing Hope nowadays, and they indeed have a residential program close to Orlando in Enterprise, FL. We are great supporters here at First Boca.

       Because of when the program was to start on Thursday morning, I decided that the group should go up the night before and do something in Orlando that Wednesday afternoon. Which we did. We went to the Titanic Experience.

       If you haven’t been to that exhibit, let me tell you just a tidbit about it. One wreck diving crew got the license (I don’t know who gives that permission) to dive the wreck and bring up from the Titanic whatever they could salvage. The rationale goes that the Titanic is breaking apart, and at some point, there will be nothing to salvage, so do it while you can! So anyway, one group got to pick items from the Titanic, but under the condition that they could not sell any of them. They brought thousands and thousands of items up from the depths of the ocean. All kinds of things, including pieces of the actual ship, and even things like wrapped postcards that somehow were still intact. It’s pretty incredible. The only way they can monetize their work is to put on these exhibits and to sell coal. They brought up a ton of coal. There was a large piece of coal in the Gift Shop, with a $500,000 price tag on it. Yes, a half a million dollars! Wow!

       I want to share one memory from that experience with you. They had recreated the radio room. They had set up a first-class bedroom suite. They also had recreated a dining room. And after touring all of that, you went to an upper area where music was playing. Having grown up in church, I recognized the tune. It was a hymn, played by a string ensemble. The hymn? “Nearer, my God, to Thee.”  The musicians (and they had a list of their names, none of whom were invited into the lifeboats) were asked to play “Nearer, My God, to Thee” as people were plunging into the frigid waters–and as they approached their own demise on the sinking ship.

       I felt torn between thinking it incredibly ironic and, conversely, perceiving it comforting that they played that song. Many of those people, whether they knew it or not, were getting “nearer to God” that night. That might be construed as ironic. But the first verse of that hymn says:

E’en though it be a cross that raiseth me,
Still all my song shall be, nearer, my God, to Thee.

I think of two things when I read that. My Mom, approaching her last days on this earth, expressed to me her gratitude for the beauty and the grace that God had surrounded her with all her life, even to the very end. I want to say, like her, that “even if it’s a horrible death that’s before me, still my song shall be one of desiring God.”  My Mom is modelling that for me. But as we celebrate Easter, my other thought is that Jesus, as he was raised on that Cross, in His final words said, “into Thy hands I commit My spirit” (I’d never noticed the Trinitarian aspect of that statement!). Jesus trusted God not to the end, put through death. Death was just one middle point in His ministry. And we are to trust, and love, and praise God not to the “end of our days,” but all through the days of this life, and into the next. That’s why Jesus died. To conquer death. And so that we could sing before it, in the midst of it, and Hallelujah!, after it, “Nearer, my God, to Thee, nearer to Thee.”

Closer to the Father because of the Son,

Craig

Remember that at that time you were separate from Christ, excluded from citizenship
in Israel and foreigners to the covenants of the promise, without hope and without God
in the world. But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far away have been brought
near by the blood of Christ. Ephesians 2:12,13 (NIV)

       Moses, in Exodus 2:22, said that he had become “a foreigner in a foreign land.”  Those words came to me the other day as I accompanied my brother and my son to a car show. I go to car shows on a regular basis, but none like this. Every car in this show, and there were hundreds, had been “slammed.”  I mean every one of them. Slamming a car means that you cut out the wheel wells, lower the geometry of the suspension so that the body of the car can rest on the ground, and then you put airbag suspension in them so that you can raise them enough to get on the road.  And then lower it again when you park.

       Oh, and every other car also had a bad case of negative camber. Do you see why I thought myself a foreigner in a foreign land? What does “negative camber” even mean? Negative camber is when the top of your car tire is closer to the car than the bottom of the tire is. Your tires wear a lot on the inside edge when this happens. Normal people go to Tire Kingdom to have that fixed. These people do it intentionally and in exaggerated ways to make the car look cartoonish.

        So here I am, a foreigner in a foreign land, and I find out that a big YouTuber car guy was there too. He is a native to this foreign land, I am not. I hadn’t even heard of him. He does one thing on YouTube, and one thing only. He stands next to a line of guys in their cars and takes a picture of a car, goes to the car behind it, and asks three questions. The first question is (as he shows the driver a picture of the car in front of him): “How would you rate this car from 1 to 10?”  Then he asks the driver how he would rate his own car. And finally, he asks a very insightful question: “How do you think other people would rate your car?”  He has done over 2000 of these. My brother got interviewed in his Toyota MR-2, I only got schooled in foreign car culture.

      I eventually got back to my own “Country” and looked up that YouTube guy. One or two videos went a long way for me. But the questions lingered. What if the videos weren’t about cars but about Jesus? What if somebody showed you a picture of Jesus, and asked you to rate how good Jesus was? And then they asked you how good do you think YOU are? And THEN they asked you how good do you think other people think you are? Or it could be something more vain: perhaps they show you a picture of the person in front of you and ask you to rate their looks. Then they ask you to rate your looks. Then they ask you how you think other people would rate your looks. What is the “delta” (as the engineers like to say) between the two numbers?

      Jesus had little patience for people whose delta (difference) was large. To the Pharisees, he said: “You are like whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of the bones of the dead and everything unclean.” (Matthew 23: 27) Ouch! They put on airs and thought of themselves 10 out of 10. But Jesus, and I would imagine most other people, could see right through that veneer. The “delta” was great between what was on the outside and what really was on the inside.

     All of us would rate our cars, or ourselves, highly. And some might agree with our assessment, and others not. Our culture teaches us to not care what others think of us. And while we don’t want to live a life trying to impress others and begging them to like us, sometimes putting ourselves in the shoes of others and focusing back on ourselves is a good exercise.

I want there to be continuity between what I think of myself, what I know of myself, and what others see in me, too. That kind of integrity is important. And matters to Jesus.

Back home,

Craig

Whoever walks in integrity walks securely, but whoever takes crooked paths will be found out.
Proverbs 10:9 (NIV)

Starting a new tab in Firefox, I landed on a “news” item that touted: “The weirdest things people have seen on Google Maps.”  Now, I like Google Maps app and use it all the time. And I haven’t really seen that many “weird” things on there, except blurred people and an occasional blurred house. But apparently some people look hard for these things. Things like a guy, dressed in the same clothes, holding the same camera – in two different States! What are the odds of that!?

       In another shot, which I really think merits a follow up, the Google car passed one of those radar detector signs that first state the speed limit and then post yours. Driving in a 25 mph School Zone, the Google car pictured itself going 32 mph.

Can you say self-incriminating?

       Another funny one was a screenshot of a little development in Nova Scotia. Off of Nova Scotia Trunk Highway 7 is, and I looked this up to verify it, a little development consisting of one street off of the Highway, and two little streets off of that. A small development. The street coming in is “This Street.”  The first street off of that is “That Street.”  And you guessed it; the second street is “The Other Street.”  As Larry the Cable Guy would say: “That’s funny right there, I don’t care who you are.”

       Other pictures showed the inconsistencies of the algorithms at Google, where some faces get blurred, like the Statue of Liberty, and some others are not. Sometimes, even pets get blurred and some don’t. In one, you can read the airline name of a plane that photobombed the satellite imaging somewhere in Mongolia if I remember correctly. In the rest of the world, it’s remarkable how you don’t see planes – there are a lot of planes out there!

        I smiled at these things because, well, it’s nice to know that the computer and the algorithms are not perfect. To be human is to be flawed. Machines can be sterile, but humans aren’t. If we were all perfect, we would all be the same. The idiosyncrasies we develop, the imperfections we find in ourselves, the mistakes we have made along the way, give us character. That truth not only makes us human but makes us likeable. People that pass themselves on as perfect lose credibility for me.

        Now, God wants us to be perfect (Matthew 5:48). And I, we, aspire to do that. And someday, in heaven, we all will be. And what a day of rejoicing that will be! But in the meantime, we need to appreciate one another’s character, one another’s imperfections.

        In Galatians 6 the Apostle Paul said, “Bear one another’s burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ.”  I think bearing one another’s burdens often means dealing, in a positive way, with the idiosyncrasies of others. What burdens one person is not necessarily what burdens another. I suppose in illness we can find uniformity – but even there, how one person deals with the adversity of physical ailments may differ from the way another one does. Or how burdensome a particular job, or financial constraint, or spouse or… how burdensome something can feel for me may be different than the way you deal with it, and together, we can make those rough places in life plain (to misquote Isaiah).

         Every person we meet has as many idiosyncrasies as we do. Let’s give each other grace in that. And stand together as brothers and sisters in it. It’s funny how the glitches of a computer got me to that thought. One of my eccentricities, I suppose.

Wishing you a smile today,

Craig

And we urge you, brothers, admonish the idle, encourage the fainthearted,
help the weak, be patient with them all. 1 Thessalonians 5:14

In Galatians 6:2, Paul says the following: “Carry each other’s burdens, and in this way, you will fulfill the law of Christ.”  I think that’s a beautiful description, and call, of Christians living in community. When one person finds themselves burdened with grief, the community expresses their love by visiting with that person, praying for that person, and bringing them meals that they might otherwise skip because of their grief.

I gave just one example. You could come up with three more, I’m sure. “Carrying each other’s burdens” can be expressed in a million ways, sometimes physical, sometimes emotional, sometimes spiritual. In England, however, they’ve carried this to a whole new and silly level. It’s called the Annual Wife-Carrying Race.

While only in its 18^th year, the idea of the race comes from 19^th Century lore in Finland that says that gangs would raid villages and pillage women, carrying them out on their shoulders. So, this race recreates that image, which (and you might need to look this up) looks sillier than you think. Everyone enjoys a piggy-back ride. I enjoyed them as a kid and enjoyed carrying my kids as an adult.  But no, wife-carrying does not work that way. It appears that weight distribution happens better when the wife is inverted. Her legs stick out in front of her hubby, and her head is, well, depending upon her height, around his, um, waist.

So, while her head is throbbing from hanging upside down, and bouncing from his, um, back, she has the horrifying job of hanging on for dear life as they race up a hill. The guy has to run both and carry the weight, holding on tightly to her legs sticking out in front of him. Talk about taking the vow “to have and to hold” literally! Oh dear!

This past week, the race was in the English countryside, and a Finnish couple won first place. The runners-up (so to speak) were a British couple who will represent England in Finland’s race in July. And, this is just for free, you need to know that the race happened in Dorking, Surrey. Indeed!

Seriously now, St. Paul’s idea of carrying one another’s burdens gains some insight from this race. Let me share some thoughts:

1. Carrying one another’s burdens can be hard.

2. It can also be fun.

3. I think particularly as Americans, where we have been taught to “pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps,”

     receiving help can feel awkward. Being carried can often, but incorrectly, feel demeaning.

4. When the whole community gets involved, cheering the grace (I use the word only in a theological sense) on,

           the load lightens and the pace quickens.

Yes, there are lessons to be found in just about everything under heaven. Even in a wife-carrying race in Dorking, England. Let us be ever learning and uplifting.

Praising the One who has lifted all our burdens,

Craig

Each of you should use whatever gift you have received to serve others,
as faithful stewards of God’s grace in its various forms.1 Peter 4:10