For All the Marbles

The expression that nature abhors a vacuum is especially true as we age: clutter, both material and mental, expands to fill our time and our lives. Those of us who are often in e-mail can attest to that as our boxes fill up frequently. A lot of stuff floating around the internet is the same old, same old, but occasionally something special comes along. Such is the story that I share with you. (No author’s name was attached—if you know you wrote it, please let us know and we’ll credit him.) What I especially enjoy about it is its universal application. It’s the advice of an older man to a younger, but its wisdom is applicable to women just as much as to men.

As I read it I thought of what Moses wrote long ago: “The length of our days is seventy years—or eighty, if we have the strength; yet their span is but trouble and sorrow, for they quickly pass, and we fly away. Teach us to number our days aright, that we may gain a heart of wisdom” (Psalm 90:10,12 NIV). This story helped remind me to number my days. Maybe it will do the same for you:

“The older I get, the more I enjoy Saturday mornings. Perhaps it’s the quiet solitude that comes with being the first to rise, or maybe it’s the unbounded joy of not having to be at work. Either way, the first few hours of a Saturday morning are most enjoyable.

A few weeks ago, I was shuffling toward the garage with a steaming cup of coffee in one hand and the morning paper in the other.  What began as a typical Saturday morning turned into one of those lessons that life seems to hand you from time to time. Let me tell you about it:

I turned the dial up into the phone portion of the band on my ham radio in order to listen to a Saturday morning swap net.  Along the way, I came across an older sounding chap, with a tremendous signal and a golden voice. You know the kind; he sounded like he should be in the broadcasting business.  He was telling whomever he was talking with something about “a thousand marbles.” I was intrigued and stopped to listen.

“Well, Tom,” the older man said, “it sure sounds like you’re busy with your job. I’m sure they pay you well but it’s a shame you have to be away from home and your family so much. Hard to believe a young fellow should have to work 60 or 70 hours a week to make ends meet.  It’s too bad you missed your daughter’s dance recital. Let me tell you something that has helped me keep my own priorities.”

That’s when he began to explain his theory of “a thousand marbles.” “You see,” he said. “I sat down one day and did a little arithmetic.  The average person lives about 75 years. I know, some live more and some live less, but on average, folks live about 75 years. Now then, I multiplied 75 times 52 and I came up with 3900, which is the number of Saturdays that the average person has in their entire lifetime. Now, stick with me, Tom, I’m getting to the important part.

“It took me until I was 55 years old to think about all this in any detail”, he went on, “and by that time I had lived through over 2800 Saturdays. I got to thinking that if I lived to be 75, I only had about 1000 of them left to enjoy.  So I went to a toy store and bought every single marble they had. I ended up having to visit three toy stores to round up 1000 marbles. I took them home and put them inside a large clear plastic container.”

“Every Saturday since then, I have taken one marble out and thrown it away. I found that by watching the marbles diminish, I focused more on the really important things in life. There is nothing like watching your time here on this earth run out to help get your priorities straight.”

“Now let me tell you one last thing before I sign-off with you and take my lovely wife out for breakfast. This morning, I took the very last marble out of the container. I figure that if I make it until next Saturday, then I have been given a little extra time. And the one thing we can all use is a little more time.”

“It was nice to meet you Tom, I hope you spend more time with your family, and I hope to meet you again here on the band.  This is a 75 year-old man, K9NZQ, clear and going QRT, good morning!”

You could have heard a pin drop on the band when this fellow signed off. I guess he gave us all a lot to think about. I had planned to work on the antenna that morning, and then I was going to meet up with a few hams to work on the next club newsletter. Instead, I went upstairs and woke my wife up with a kiss. “C’mon honey. I’m taking you to breakfast.”

“What brought this on?” she asked with a smile. “Oh, nothing special, it’s just been a long time since we spent a Saturday together. And hey, can we stop at a toy store while we’re out? I need to buy some marbles.”

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What Do You Want to Be When the Kids Grow Up?

When I was younger with small children, my husband occasionally came home from work to me bombarding him with talk. Once he said to me, “Talk to adults much?” and laughed.

I said, “No! And that’s the problem.”

I was not amused.

My husband learned that there were times I needed to unload. And he needed to listen and not tell me how to fix it.

Everyone says that children grow up too soon. And it’s true. You turn around and they’re gone. Not gone to the ends of the earth (usually) but irrevocably gone to jobs and homes and families of their own. Then, according to surveys we fill out about who lives in our home, we are childless.

“Empty nest” is one of the few completely descriptive terms in the English language. If the home you raised your children in was the right kind of home, it was like a nest:  a place of provision and protection. The children were sheltered under your wings and kept secure until they were old enough to move on. Human mothers often resist this phase, but in nature not so much. The mother eagle sometimes pushes the eaglets out of the nest to teach them to fly. They learn quickly as they’re falling. And she swoops under them and catches them if they’re slow learners.

Whether our eaglets fall, glide, or soar out of our nests, eventually our nests become “empty.” That too is descriptive: not just of the amount of unoccupied space in our homes but of the feeling we can have: the empty feeling that our family is gone. Unfortunately, we sometimes translate that feeling into the idea that our usefulness is gone. The freedom that many women think they will enjoy with an empty nest isn’t realized because they are too wrapped up in what used to be to enjoy what currently is.

If that feeling is indulged, instead of enjoying the freedom to do new things, a woman finds she doesn’t know what to do. Some make a serious mistake at this point by infringing on their children’s freedom with too many phone calls, letters, unsolicited advice or visits.

From ancient times up until the early part of the 20^th century, women had many children. Because people had shorter life spans, often before the youngest child was raised to adulthood, the mother (by then in her 50s) died. Gradually family size became much smaller, and childrearing was finished earlier, often in a woman’s 40s. At the same time life spans increased: women began living into their 70s.

Women were faced with a question: What will you do with the next approximately 30 years of life when you are no longer raising a family?

Those who have the most problems with their empty nests are often those who weren’t prepared to face those years. They considered their occupation and calling to be a stay-at-home mother. Then their job grew up and left them. It was an empty nest indeed!

When this happens, women often feel as unemployed as if they’d received a pink slip from a corporation. Only worse! People can go out and get another job. Rarely do women decide to or are physically able to start having more babies to replenish their family.

So I’ll ask you the question I asked myself many years ago: what do you want to be (not when you grow up but) when your kids grow up? I’m not urging you to have a second career plan to fall back on; I’m urging you to think about how to wisely fill the years the Lord gives you after your childrearing duties are over.

Having an empty nest returns you to the identity you had B.C. (before children). You are more than just your husband’s wife and your children’s mother.  You are your heavenly Father’s daughter, and that doesn’t change. He has plans for you even in the later years of your life. His will for you might include a career in the workplace or in a ministry or increased volunteer work in your church. It could mean honing a creative skill or talent you only dabbled at before. But it should also include growing closer to God and becoming a mature example of His grace.

Moses lived to be 120, but the last 40 years (the last third of his lifetime) were the productive years. During those years he followed God and led the children of Israel (often wayward children) out of bondage in Egypt. A line in one of the two psalms he wrote could also be the prayer of every woman who faces a changing life season. In Psalm 90:12 (NIV), Moses prayed: “Teach us to number our days aright, that we may gain a heart of wisdom.”

My prayer for all whose nests are empty is that your hearts may be full — full of godly wisdom.

And We Laughed As Silly Kids Will Do

Patti M. Hummel

It’s Summer Time and the living is easy… Great lyrics to a song most of us recognize, but have times changed so much since they were penned by Ira and George Gershwin and their fellow writer DuBose Heyward in 1935?  Oh, yes, they have!

Even when I was a child the lyrics held more truth than it does today. Most days, nothing about summer time seems particularly easy. The rush and complication of most summer days keeps us so busy and overloaded with running around to meet the demands of the day that there is nothing about them that is easy!

When the last day of school landed my six siblings and me on the bus ride home we had no grandiose thoughts of vacations or activities that had to be scheduled weeks in advance in order to not interrupt our parent’s schedule. We were going home from the last day of school for the summer! That was it. Now, that did not mean that we would be sitting around  bored for three months (which was actually three months back then).  The difference meant that we would not be going to school and that our list of chores increased drastically.

Summer time meant that we helped to do the laundry in a ringer washing machine that adorned the back porch and we hung it on long clothes lines supported in the center with tree branches.  What fun it was to rush to bring the laundry in when a summer storm blew in from somewhere. And we laughed as silly kids will do.

Often Daddy would take a few of us with him when he walked to the pond to fish with poles made from branches. It was not easy to sit that still, but Daddy insisted that if we moved the fish would not bite. So we obeyed and sat waiting for something larger than a minnow to tug on our lines. We had no coolers so when meal time came we gathered our fishing poles and walked through the cow pasture back to our little house laughing as silly kids will do when one of us happened upon a cow patty before realizing it and got our shoes coated with the dark goo.

Vacation Bible School was the only big summer event in our lives and perhaps a revival that lasted from Sunday to Saturday and everyone in the neighborhood attended. I was saved in VBS so my heart is especially tender toward the continuation of that special week each summer. The commencement program was the most exciting thing I had ever witnessed. I loved being a part of those programs sharing with the audience what we had learned that week. Walking up to receive our certificate for attending and being bragged on by our teachers and the VBS Director (always the mother of one of our friends and our own mother a few times) brought such happiness that we laughed as silly kids will do.

In the late summer Daddy and Mother would have us cover our bodies as much as we could and we would walk single file through the woods… Daddy in the lead, Mother at the end with the seven of us keeping step in the middle much like an army of ants. All the while Daddy would be looking up in the trees. Finally he would stop and tell us to spread the sheets we brought with us all over the ground. He would climb a tree and begin to shake it vigorously causing muscadines to fall and bounce all over the sheets. We were there to make certain that none were lost. Walking home with our bounty brought memories of the yummy muscadine hull pies and the jelly Mother would make with the load we had and we laughed like silly kids will do.

On Saturday afternoons Mother and Daddy would gather us to take a ride to the creek just past the old bridge. Many from our church and community would be there. The water was cold and refreshing on those long hot South Carolina days. We played until the little ones fell asleep and until it was almost too dark to see. Then we went home to be hosed off before we got ready for bed and we laughed like silly kids will do.

There was some free time as we waited for the garden to produce its fruit, so we were creative in our play. We had to be because there was no stack of toys, no videos, no magazines, and not any of the items kids today demand. We drew houses on the ground and drew furniture in them that we had seen in the Sears Catalog. We made our houses as grand as we possibly could. And, we insisted that our siblings enter through the doors and not the walls. We spent hours in our houses. We made crowns form leaves and thorns, and necklaces and bracelets from woven grasses. We transformed ourselves into rich princesses, and we laughed as silly kids will do.

Summer time meant that we would be helping in the garden and when we picked a tomato the birds had already been eating on, we would throw it as far as we could watching it smash and scatter, and we laughed as silly kids will do.

We helped to wash the vegetables and cut them so that mother could can some and freeze others. We learned to cut out our own clothes and learned to sew… often after taking our crooked stitches out several times before the garment was right. Trying on half finished dresses inside-out with only part of a hem in place made us laugh as silly kids will do.

Other activities are equally as memorable: catching fireflies, making toad stools in the wet sand, counting stars, searching the clouds for figures and items of interest, eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and drinking Kool aid (the drink of choice) almost daily for lunch, waiting for the mailman who actually spoke to us and delivered 3 cent stamps, looking forward to the delivery of the Grit paper, eating the first harvest from our garden, sitting outside at night with neighbors talking about what a great summer we were all having… and we laughed as silly kids will do.

In Ecclesiastes 3 we are reminded that there is a time for everything. Verse 8 ends with, “…and a time of peace.” I wonder if your summer will end with a time of peace. If not, perhaps we all need to find those things that make us laugh as silly kids will do.

To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven:  A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted; A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up;  A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance; A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing; A time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away; A time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;  A time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace. Ecclesiastes 3:1-8 KJV