The apartment

A large apartment on the Rue des ____

my entrance uncertain,

   reflecting unease:

   what am I here

   why did this woman

I do not know have never met

leave me this apartment

in her will no one can say will say

not even her attorney

   with the waxed moustache

   he shrugs, merely,

   like only the French do

I’ve only been to Paris once

The rooms are large, or seem large,

tall ceilings like open skies

above shining boulevards.

Neighbors stand at the door

and watch, reluctant to accept

my invitation to enter.

A recluse, they say, she was

a recluse, most of us did not meet

The gift contained this instruction:

find the treasure

I stare at clutter, decades

of accumulation, love affairs

but no family, books in the French

I do not read or speak,

small watercolors and framed prints

of famous oils clutter the walls

as if she’d been afraid to allow

any open space to be seen

and dust

Too much furniture,

magazines and newspapers stacked

and measureable with yardsticks

or is it meter sticks in France

Two floors and a basement,

a basement opening to the walkway

along the Hugo-esque sewer, basement

walls enameled like deep blue cloisonné,

urn-like, as if the apartment was a bouquet

arranged in its funerary vase

a tiny, rather bare kitchen suggests

the lady dined out,

often

Each room replicates the pattern

of dust and clutter and too much

furniture, inundated with clutter,

strangled, clutter hiding whatever

treasure lies here; who could know

no television set or radio or computer

or even empty spaces where they]

would have been placed

A moment’s panic as I hear a mob

of young teenage girls, like wolves,

beating on the door, demanding

   entrance.

I imagine them with pink hair, black

leather jackets, gang-like, each with

knitting needles. They go away,

   bored

The party (the neighbors) finally arrive

with cheap wine, baguettes and cheese.

One brings grapes. They laugh

and smoke, the clutter offering

an infinity of ashtrays. Only the French

still smoke, I think, and perhaps the Turks.

Only one speaks English and translates

for me and the rest. Finally they leave,

first demanding a view of the basement

and its walls and its doorway to the sewer.

They heard stories, they say, but can’t

remember them

The clutter is overpowering

I walk to the full-length bedroom windows

pull back heavy curtains of equal parts

dust and brocade and it is on the balcony

I find the treasure:

the view 

Photograph: an apartment in Paris that was literally untouched for 70 years, by Paris Design Agenda.

A Sad Goodbye - and New Beginnings

Note: The editors at The High Calling are beginning to post final stories about the years we spent working on the online publication. I’ll be posting links to the articles as they’re published; my own is scheduled to publish here on Aug. 31.

Here’s the beginning and link to the article posted by Dena Dyer.

A Sad Goodbye – and New Beginnings

By Dena Dyer

“Hi, I’m Dena,” I said to a dark-haired man, about my age, sitting down the row from me. We were both waiting for the “newbies” meeting at Mount Hermon Writer’s Conference to begin.

“I’m Marcus,” he replied, and as we chatted about poetry (his passion) and non-fiction (mine), we discovered that we lived twenty minutes away from one another in Texas. It was a God-incidence, and soon after our initial meeting, Marcus asked me to write for The High Calling about my work as a singer and actress in a theater company. So began a friendship, and a professional relationship, for which I’ll always be grateful.

To continue reading, please visit Dena at her blog, Dena Dyer: Hope and Humor for Hurting Women.


Photograph: The Frio River, which you have to drive through to reach Laity Lodge, where The High Calling staff met annually.

J.I. Packer’s “Knowing God”

The sermon at our church this past Sunday was on Acts 13, the commissioning of Barnabas and Saul (Paul) by the church at Antioch for what we know as Paul’s first missionary journey. Two things about the passage I found particularly striking.

First, the selection and commissioning of the two was unexpected. While the church was worshipping and fasting, the Holy Spirit spoke, likely through someone in the church, to set Barnabas and Saul apart “for the work to which I have called them” (Acts 13:2). This wasn’t a suggestion or proposal by Barnabas and Saul; this wasn’t the result of a great plan of missions and outreach by the church. It happened during the normal course of worship.

And the pair were immediately commissioned; instead, there was more fasting and prayer and then the church “placed their hands on them and sent them off” (Acts 13:3).

Second, no one had any idea where they were going. Barnabas and Saul didn’t have a presentation on the spiritual needs of Cyprus or Galatia. Instead, the two were “sent on their way by the Holy Spirit” (Acts 13:4). They make their way to Seleucia, the seaport for Antioch about 16 miles from the city. From there, they sail to Cyprus and eventually to Pisidian Antioch in Galatia, in what is now Turkey.

This doesn’t sound at all like what I have known of the churches I’ve attended. Imagine being in a regular Sunday worship service and someone stands up, points to Joe and Susan Miller, and says they are to be set apart for the work of the Lord. We would all think that a little strange, and I bet Joe and Susan Miller would find even more than a little strange.

But that’s how God worked in the church at Antioch. And I ask myself the question, how well do I know God?

I’m getting ready to find out.

I first read J.I. Packer’s Knowing God some 40 years ago. I might have reread it some 10 or 15 years later, but it has remained on the bookshelf, a work I treasured.

Tim Challies, associate pastor at Grace Fellowship Church in Toronto, is leading a reading of Knowing God starting today (you can find the details here). Challies has a popular blog, Informing the Reforming, and every so often he leads a discussion of a classic Christian work. Knowing God has been a classic Christian work from its first publication in 1973.

Here’s what Packer wrote in the foreword to the 1973 edition: “The conviction behind the book is that ignorance of God – ignorance of both his ways and of the practice of communion with him – lies at the root of much of the church’s weakness today.”

Can we say anything is different 42 years later? Can we say it might possibly be worse?

Challies is well-suited to leading this discussion. If you’re familiar with his blog, you know the depth of his understanding and how he works to provide resources to help build knowledge and encourage the body of believers we call the church. He reflects a Reformed Christian tradition, which is the same tradition of my own church in St. Louis. He’s the cofounder of Cruciform Press and the author of The Discipline of Spiritual Discernment (2007), Sexual Detox: A Guide For Guys Who Are Sick of Porn (2010), and The Next Story: Life and Faith After the Digital Explosion (2011).

All that’s required to participate is to follow along. I may occasionally post articles here but I’m not planning on a regular weekly post. But I will be following and participating in the discussion at Tim’s blog and via social media.

Consider joining the reading. It’s a wonderful work, and it’s needed just as much now as when it was first published.

Photograph by Christina Spiegeland via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

“Thou art my hiding place and my shield”

Corrie ten Boom is lying in bed, trying to recover from the flu. It is the morning of Feb. 28, 1944, in Haarlem in The Netherlands. In what seems a fevered dream, she keeps hearing a buzzing, then becomes aware of people rushing past her. Groggily, she realizes that the Jews hiding in her family’s shop and home are rushing to conceal themselves in the hidden room.

The Gestapo is at the door.

The day long feared, long worried over, longed hoped that it would never happen, is here.

Corrie, her sister Betsie, their elderly father, their other sister and brother, and a grandchild are arrested. People are still concealed in the hidden room.

Both Corrie and her sister are physically struck, several times, the Gestapo captain demanding to know where the secret room is. Neither sister admits there is such a room. They will not betray the people they’ve been trying to help.

A succession of fellow conspirators arrive at the shop to report the latest arrests, not realizing they are walking into the Gestapo’s arms. Corrie has to listen to each walk into arrest. Later at the police station, she learns that a total of 35 people have been arrested because of the raid on the ten Boom shop.

If you’ve ever read the classic Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, you’ll know how the history of Christianity can read like a long list of persecutions, imprisonments, massacres, murders, and torture. The early church knew it; various sects knew it; both Protestants and Catholics knew it during the extended period of the religious wars in Europe; missionaries have known it; the dwindling number of Christians in the Middle East know it; the church in China knows it. Christianity is not about the prosperity gospel; it is not about the “enlargement of territory” a la  The Prayer of Jabez.

The church in Americas has been largely shielded from these trials in the last century. And it’s easy to forget that Christianity is not about worship styles and building programs.

Christianity is about the cross.

As she describes in The Hiding Place, Corrie had packed a prison bag, with her Bible, some clothes and toilet things, vitamins and aspirin. She had leaned it against the entrance to the concealed room. There it stayed, Corrie daring not to reach for it because it give away the room’s entrance. She left the bag to help protect the people hidden behind it.

Corrie and her family are taken away, her prison bag left behind. She has nothing with her, no medicines, no clothes, no Bible.

All she has is her faith and God.

The ten Booms now face the experience of the cross.

Led by Jason Stasyszen and Sarah Salter, we’ve been reading The Hiding Place. To see more posts on this chapter, “The Raid,” please visit Jason at Connecting to Impact.

Photograph by Anne Lowe via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission. 

The Stewardship of Retirement

Original themed content at The High Calling is ending this week, with posts next week featuring each editor’s favorite post (I have to sort through five years of articles to determine a favorite.) Appropriately enough, the theme this week is “Finishing Strong,” and I have a post entitled “The Stewardship of Retirement:”

As the time approached for me to seriously considering retiring, I discovered something: retirement is not a biblical concept.

Moses led the Israelites until he died and God buried him somewhere in Moab. David was king until he died. Paul and Peter continued their ministries until they were martyred. Even the Apostle John, exiled on Patmos, the only disciple who (it’s believed) died of old age, was still working, writing down the vision given him.

The Bible has no retirement road map. But it does have a concept that applies to retirement in the twenty-first century, and that concept is stewardship.

To continue reading, please see my post at The High Calling.

Photograph by Paul Brennan via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

The Circus: The Last Hurrah of Childhood

I was 12. My soon-to-be-sister-in-law was taking me and her younger sister to the circus. I had been to the circus once before, but had few memories.

This was the Shrine Circus, which came annually to New Orleans and set up in what was then the largest building for shows and exhibitions in the city – the Municipal Auditorium downtown. The auditorium continued to operate until Hurricane Katrina in 2005, when it suffered flooding and wind damage. It is currently closed, but at the time I went to the Shrine Circus, that was far into the future.

The auditorium is bounded by North Rampart Street, Basic Street, and Congo Square. In fact, it’s right across North Rampart from the French Quarter. It’s built adjacent to what used to be known as Storyville, New Orleans’ famed red light district where jazz was born. The area is now known as Faubourg Treme, but when I was 12 it was more simply “downtown” – we didn’t have “faubourgs” back then. Downtown was where you went for entertainment; all of the large movie theaters were downtown – the Saenger, the Loew’s State, the Joy, and the RKO Orpheum. In the next few years, much would be swept away in a wave of demographic and social change.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Image by Karen Arnold via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Joanne Norton’s “The Soroti Project”

In 1987, a man named Joseph Kony emerged in northern Uganda as the head of a rebel group called the Lord’s Resistance Army, or LRA. While fighting and rebel armies in Africa are nothing new, Kony brought a new level of barbarity to warfare – killing adults and capturing children for both soldiers and sexual slaves.

The LRA’s activities went on until 2006, when a truce was worked out with the Ugandan government and the LRA seemingly disappeared toward the Congo or (some say) Sudan. In between, an estimated 100,000 people were killed, 20,000 children abducted and 1.5 million citizens forced to flee, many ending up in what were called “IDP camps,” or the refugee sites of “Internally Displaced Persons.”

The statistics contain sufficient horror. The individual stories describe the horror in human terms that bring the statistics home. But while there was the horror, there was also hope. And that is the story told by Joanne Norton in The Soroti Project: A Heart-Filled and Heartless Story in Uganda.

Norton had worked as a missionary in Uganda previously, and she eventually found herself called back to a place to which she thought she’d never return. She found the horror and the tragedy, and she found the hope.

Just as she did in her book The Annie Project, Norton writes her story as fiction, combining both her own real experiences (and some actual photos) with a fictional technique. But the stories are real.

The story focuses on one IDP camp, located northeast of the capital of Kampala near the town of Soroti. Norton and fellow missionaries live there for a time, working with the people, local churches, and friends. She leaves little to the imagination about the living conditions the missionaries experienced – ongoing worries about the food and water; mosquitoes and malaria; threats to personal safety; and the conditions of latrines.

An IDP camp

But these pale in comparison to the stories she tells.

Children who were enslaved but managed to escape. A man who the LRA thought it killed three times, until the soldiers threatened to kill their captain if he tried again. The teenage boy Boniface, who died in the arms of his sister. The pastors who risked their lives to serve the refugees and victims. The good humor and laughter of the people in spite of what they’ve endured. And the growth and spread of Christian faith.

The Soroti Project is a deeply moving account, not only for making the experience of millions of people real but also for the hope that’s always there.

Related: My review of The Annie Project.

Image of Soroti Rock (top) via Wikipedia, used with permission under Creative Commons license. Map of Uganda via InfoPlease. Public domain photograph of an IDP camp via USAID.