Blog Archives - trish hermanson

Is Easter a Fairy Tale?

3/30/2018

Is Easter a fairy tale?
     All that stuff about angels and a death and resurrection?
     Consider this: J.R.R. Tolkien, who gave us The Lord of the Rings, says that fairy tales enable us to escape time and death, commune with nonhuman beings, find perfect love, and triumph over evil. That’s what makes them so popular.
  Author Tim Keller says these elements satisfy “the deepest desires of the human heart.” They are “a memory trace of the garden of Eden” because “deep in your heart, you know that’s how people are supposed to live.”
     But we can’t live that way, right?
     Yes, we can, Keller says. The essence of Easter is that because Jesus Christ came back from the dead, those who believe in him “will experience these things.”
     We’ll escape time and death through eternal life, he says. We’ll interface with the work of angelic beings here on Earth. We’ll live in God’s perfect love. And we’ll experience the triumph of good over evil.
     This shakes me up because too often I forget that Christianity is actually a journey with the Supernatural as adventurous as that taken by the Fellowship of the Ring.
     So I’m joining the hobbits with a toast to this pilgrimage - Easter is the most fantastic fairy tale because it is true.

What Do E.T. and Dorothy Long For?

3/23/2018

What do both E.T. and Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz long for?
     It’s a simple, four-letter word.
     E.T. pointed his bony finger toward the heavens and mourned for home.
     Dorothy faced a Wicked Witch with Flying Monkeys to get back home.
     We all aspire for the peace and comfort that’s inherent in that little word.
   In fact, we may have the best of times with family and friends. But after we say our goodbyes, we may sense that what we’ve experienced is just a taste of something better - what “home” is meant to be.
     That’s because we live in a paradise lost, where one way or another, everything’s broken.
     So we yearn for more.
     “We were not meant for this world alone,” Billy Graham said. “We were meant for Heaven. And Heaven is our ultimate home.”    Which is why I burst with excitement that Jesus said he was going on ahead to prepare a place for us in God’s big, big house. Where nothing is broken. With no more goodbyes. Only endless hellos.
  What a homecoming that will be.

The Truth about St. Patrick

3/16/2018

I don’t mean to make you Irish cry in your green beer, but here’s the shocking truth about your patron saint: Patrick wasn’t Irish. He was English. And in Patrick’s story, the Irish aren’t the good guys.
     In the fifth century, Patrick was captured by the Irish from his English home and hauled off to become a slave, working as a swineherd.
     Patrick, a lackluster follower of God, prayed for his freedom and escaped. He fled and made it back to England to be reunited with his family. Gratitude!
     He would have happily stayed there, but a dream rocked him: babies in Ireland pleaded for him to return to tell them about Christ. He couldn’t shake off the dream, so he received monastic training and traveled back into the country that had once enslaved him, according to historian Bruce L. Shelley (“Church History in Plain Language”).
     A touching story, yes, but what’s it got to do with us?
     What if Patrick’s story is our story? What if something has taken us captive so we’re in a pigsty of trouble? Things like bitterness, or compulsions, or pleasures?
     That’s happened to me. Like Patrick, I cried out for divine help. Escape came, and I threw off chains of hurts, habits, and hangups (as Celebrate Recovery puts it). Gratitude!
     I’m not Irish, but I happily claim Patrick as the patron saint representing deliverance from whatever enslaves us.
     Because who wants to stay in bondage?

(Photo by Nheyob, own work, [CC BY-SA 4.0, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0], via Wikimedia Commons, at Saint Patrick Catholic Church, Junction City, Ohio)

Is My Life a Great Story?

3/9/2018

Ever compare your life to a great story? I have.
     By “great story,” I mean one that I don’t read; it reads me. It plunges me down the mine shaft of my soul, hands me a pickax, and demands I chisel at the dross until I uncover treasures. It reveals secrets I don’t know about myself, or something I know but feared to face.
     A great story seduces me, then abandons me on its final page, leaving me bereft. Yet its memory enables me to rise, still mourning, and re-enter life with a sturdier stance.
     A great story asks me whether I’m making a great story of MY life. Am I embracing both love and sorrow, adventure and solitude? Do I stay in the safe village, or do I sometimes venture onto the road of risk?
     When I reach my final pages, will I have forgiven myself and others for mistakes along the way?
     And even if I don’t understand all the twists and turns in the plot, will I shout a hearty “thank you”?
     That’s a great story - and a great life.

Barbara's Trip from Woodstock to Foodstock

3/2/2018

She was one of those ’60s people Joni Mitchell sang about, a child of God walking along a road that led to Woodstock. Seeds of goodwill from attending that music festival planted in Barbara Moore’s soul.
But they lay dormant for years, squelched by life in the corporate fast lane. Then Barbara asked herself what she really wanted. “To get back to the garden.”
She learned that more than 200,000 children struggle with hunger every day in Colorado. Some receive free or reduced-cost school lunches. But on weekends, they may go hungry. In one family, the kids play a guessing game: “Who’s going to get to eat this weekend?”
     Barbara went into action, and Jeffco Eats was born. Volunteers bag food items and transport them to schools for students to carry home for the weekend.
     Meeting needs doesn’t have to come through an organization. One woman I know watches out for latchkey kids on her block, helping them with loose bike chains. A grandfather runs errands for his daughter so she doesn’t have to haul her preschoolers around. A group of women knit hats for homeless teens.
     The world’s needs can overwhelm me. But I heard a man say, “Sometimes the most spiritual thing you can do is to stop praying only and to start doing.”
     Good advice. So I’m part of Barbara’s brigade, filling bags with meals for hungry tummies. We’re transforming the idealism of Woodstock into the reality of foodstock.
     Because nobody should be forced to guess who gets to eat this weekend.