Kellogg Was Invited For Dinner

We received a letter in a mail from a friend and amazing prayer warrior on our behalf. The card mentioned something like "I hope that Micah has gotten some more chickens since his return to Ethiopia." Well, the answer to that hope is both yes and no. We have only dabbled in chickens lately, buying three hens in the local market, one of which was sick and all of which have since died. One of those hens hatched one chick before croaking and so until yesterday, we have a daddy and a baby. Well, the daddy, named Kellogg was not popular with our teammates, whose house is located unfortunately close to the chicken coup. Apparently they didn't like the 4am "call the prayer" belted out by Kellogg each morning. Anyway, with no other pens in usable condition and no time to work on them, we opted to invite Kellogg to a special dinner at our house.

Warning: the video is not for the faint-hearted chicken lovers who think that McNuggets grow on trees. And yes, I confess that I should have spent a bit more time sharpening my knife, but as you see, it finished the job. My assistant in the procedure, however, didn't follow through on his end of the bargain. We practiced several times, yet we didn't take into account the headless flapper lunging toward him in blind self defense. Yes, he was freaked out by it for a bit, but in the end he thought it was cool. He was even the one to throw the head into the pit toilet. The whole rest of the day he was excited to eat rooster for dinner - and in the end, he was mighty tasty!

He Sees What No One Else Sees

I’m one of those Christians who likely doesn’t give the Holy Spirit enough credit. Sure I will acknowledge him as at work in the world and even within my heart and mind, but when it comes to actually “hearing his voice” or receiving his guidance, I feel like a blundering skeptic. After all, I know how my mind can fire random thoughts at jackrabbit speed, and I believe these thoughts can be manipulated by both God and Satan. So when voices are echoing off the walls of my head, how do I discern the voice of God, the voice of the Holy Spirit from that of myself or others?

 

And so, with this experiential and theological background, I wasn’t exactly comfortable when our spiritual retreat speaker and his team got up front and started describing “pictures” and thoughts that they felt God wanted us to hear. Then, even more uncomfortable for me, the team was asked to come out and lay hands on individuals for special Holy Spirit-directed prayer. Well, one young man, 19-year-old, Luke came straight away to me, sandwiched my torso in his hands and began praying in a quiet whisper, “Come Holy Spirit, come.” I didn’t know exactly how to understand that prayer since in its simplicity, it implied that the Holy Spirit was not already present. Yet, maybe there was a thought left out, something more like “Come on, Holy Spirit, reveal to me what I should pray for this person.” At least that is how I understood it. As I listened and waited, I tried hard to search my heart and my thoughts for what the Holy Spirit’s ‘coming’ might stir in me, but after a good minute of this, I felt like I was staring into an empty oil drum. Finally, Luke spoke up, “I believe God wants me to tell you this, that He sees what no one else sees…”

 

My immediate response was to swallow a chuckle as I thought “Yea, that includes what you and I can’t see either, apparently I wasn’t the only one seeing the empty oil drum.” But deep down, I really don’t want to be a cynic and I want to be learning and growing in my faith. So I let that thought mull around in my mind even after Luke had moved on to pray for another. “He sees what no one else sees.” Of course that phrase (and any piece of language really) could mean a large number of different things depending on the context in which is interpreted, so I thought about where that statement might in fact find significance in my life right now. “He sees what no one else sees.” What if ‘see’ has a deeper meaning, as it often does, to refer not simply to the processing of visual input, but rather to the arrival at deeper understanding. “He sees and understands what no one else does.” Now that is a HUGE statement that speaks directly into something I’ve been wrestling with for more than two years! In order to explain, however, I need to take a step back, back to last week Friday…

 

(I purposefully stop the story here, not because I am wanting to hide the HUGE lesson that the Lord taught me, but rather I fear that it might be misunderstood by some of the readers who might randomly pop onto our blog. If you are wanting to finish reading this story, send us an email and we will forward the rest of it to you privately.)

I Aint Going In and It Aint Coming Out!

Bounce…bounce……….plop. What started as a normal Daddy-Micah bathroom run at the nice open-air restaurant had turned out to be nothing short of a crisis in the little 2-year-old mind. “When all of a sudden there arose such a clatter (that is, from within the bathroom), Andrea and Grace sprung up to see what was the matter.” Micah emerged with full tears streaking down his face “Mommy, mommy, my…my…my shoe!” She looked down to see his right foot naked against the packed dirt. “Where is your shoe?” she asked, calm as usual. “It fell down the poop hole!” Micah exclaimed with amazing clarity before resuming his tear-filled wail.

Sure enough, he told the truth, we both saw it go bounce…bounce……..plop and if Micah had just a bit more critical thinking skills, he would have easily determined that it was entirely my fault. You see, Micah and I went in search of the bathroom together, finding a nice porcelain john in a small room behind the building. Just as we were headed toward it, the owner of the restaurant called out to us, “For the child? Go to the other one! It is better for the child.” He pointed at one of his workers, sending him with us to make sure we found it ok. Down a long row of doors, we were led to the last room, in which we found your typical “squatty potty.” Mind you, it was a rather clean one, but a squatty potty nonetheless. I would never have chosen a squatty potty for taking Micah to the bathroom (#2), but with the personal escort, I couldn’t very well refuse. And so we decided to make it work.

This is not the exact squatty potty in question, but of similar style.

 Now the perches on this particular potty were quite far apart so I knew right away that Micah could not have his feet on them with his pants at his ankles. The pants needed to come off. You’ve likely been there before in some grimy public bathroom – you take off one shoe, balance on one foot while carefully removing that pant leg only to land that foot back into the shoe. Yea, well, add the components of a two-year-old and a full-sized father squeezed into a closet-sized room, none of whose surfaces would have ever seen a can of Lysol. But anyway, Micah and I worked together and we managed to get his pants off and his shoes back on with relative success. Next, Micah did his business and he did it well, that is with me supporting half his weight as he leaned back over the hole.

With everything cleaned up, we were left with the final challenge of putting the pants back on. Hindsight is always 20/20, but I wish that we had come out of that filthy “closet” for part two of the balancing act. After all, it wouldn’t be anything that hadn’t already been revealed. You see, it wasn’t quite thirty minutes earlier that Micah had dropped his pants to his ankles, held his shirt up to his neck and “watered” the grass – yes, FACING toward all the customers who were enjoying their meals in the nice open courtyard. Now, the public donning of trousers would simply be seen as act 2 in this afternoon’s dinner theatre. But I didn’t think about it at the time. Instead, I took Micah and sat him down on my lap. I popped the first shoe off and it bounced off into the corner. I wasn’t about the touch the bottom of those shoes so as to remove them carefully. No way, I know where they had been standing! I popped the second shoe off and the world suddenly went into slow motion! Bounce…bounce…….plop.

 

We were silent and still for a few seconds, both having seen what had happened. Finally, Micah taunted me with his obvious question, “Daddy, where's my shoe?” “It went down the hole.” I replied calmly. His reply, “I want it to come out!” was met with blunt realism, “It is not going to come out!” And that is where the wailing began.

Daddy, where's my other red shoe?

Micah loved those shoes and we loved them too as shoes he could slip on by himself, and yet they held secure enough for him to run in. Not to mention Lightning McQueen on the front! I looked down the hole with a weak flashlight but saw nothing. I’m not sure how deep the hole was, and I wasn’t about the stick my hand down there to blindly feel around. This father’s love has some limits! Much of the ride home and the rest of the evening was spent fielding question about the whereabouts of his shoe. And still now, one week later, if you ask him, he’ll probably tell you, “My other red shoe fell down the poop hole, but I want it to come out!” As for me, I am perfectly happy leaving it right where it is.