Last Friday night was exciting.  I was on my way to the car to go eat with Pat when she said, "Come here, Mom.  Look."  And there next to my driveway in a bush, about a foot from the ground, was a swarm of bees the size of two or three footballs.  After a few calls I found someone to come get them  at 10 o'clock that night--after they settled down.  I was amazed that some of the people I called offered to kill them.  Gee, I could have killed them.  Anyone could.  But who would kill a bee!!!  That would be Murder.   Duh.

I could have detached the swarm into a box, but I gave away my (Becky's hand-me-down) bee suit and hat.  She, Becky, had brought me her hive and smoker, bee-stuff, etc. when she moved from Billings, Mt. headed to Houston or Illinois or somewhere.  She put duct tape around the hive, put it in the back of her SUV, and drove from Montana to Oklahoma with a zillion bees buzzing in the back seat.  (I never said any of my kids had good sense.)

I kept the bees for a few years.  They swarmed occasionally.  Once into my apple tree.  One of my friends had an extra hive so I called him.  He held the ladder, placed the box under the swarm while I climbed  up into the tree and knocked the swarm down.   It was an exciting bee rescue.  We need them.  They are vanishing.  Losing them would be tragic.  (Nobody got stung.)

Everything went well after the man picked them up,  until I got up Saturday morning, went out to check the bush, and found a tiny swarm that had been left behind in the dark.  The queen was gone and the orphan bees didn't know what to do.  So they just wadded up into a ball and hummed.  I felt so upset for them.  I called Pat.  Then had Becky come over and  between my two daughter's bee-guru advice, I had to face the truth.  Nature is cruel.  Those bees were going to die.  It's Monday.  They are still there.  I have been praying that God will help them find their way back home.  Maybe their old family will forgive them for leaving with a new Queen.  I hope so.  Even bees deserve a second chance.  It's upsetting to know there isn't anything I can do.

Of all the books in the Bible, if I could keep just one, it would be Romans.  I hadn't read it in a while, but was marking up a Bible that I have been using lately, and was doing it by underlining in pencil the passages that I wanted to "jump out" at me, and coloring in green, passages that I had previously memorized.

I had done Luke, Acts, the two letters Peter wrote, and the three letters John wrote, before I went back to Romans.  The thing that I found, with Romans, is that almost every verse needs to be underlined.  It is the most concise, thought out, accurately written account of what the Jews thought salvation consisted of--compared with what salvation truly is in Jesus Christ.  Paul is a great writer.

Paul contrasts the Jewish system of reaching God with comparisons that "close the door."  He effectively argues that Christ has always been the sacrifice that God will accept as a payment for our sins.  The Jews felt that they were "chosen," and therefore they were just fine.  They believed that by birth, they were God's children.  But Paul informs them that, "All have sinned and come short of the Glory of God." Romans  3:23  And that "There is none righteous, no not one." Rom. 3:10  Then he tells them that "...we conclude that man is justified by faith without the deeds of the law." Rom. 3:28

And Paul is just getting started.  Line after line, Paul informs the Jews that their "law" does not save them.  That they aren't able to keep it anyway.  "...if you will confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus, and believe in your heart that God has raised him from the dead, you shall be saved."  Rom. 10:9

And finally, Paul lets them know that everyone is included: Rom. 10:13 "...whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved."  Including Gentiles.  No wonder they tried to kill him.

The minute you start thinking you are someone special, God will find a way to assure you that the only thing that makes you special is that He loves you.  Enough to die for you.  That's it.

Last Thursday and Friday, March 31 and April 1, I wrote the story of Ken crawling under the barracks to get the cat.  I should have included a story from forty-six years later.

Ken was eighty four years old, and in the last week of his life.  He knew it; we knew it.  It was a bitter-sweet time.  He had lived a very full life.  We had loved each other for fifty-seven years.  But it was all over.  He couldn't fight any more.  Thank God I got to keep him at home--with Pat's help.

She and I would double-team taking care of him and on the last day of his life, Pat was watching him while I was in surgery.  Had I known the end was so near, I would have never left.  I would have rescheduled.  But we never know.  "Death comes like a thief in the night..."

When I got home, she told me what  the last coherent words were that he spoke.  He said, "Pat, I have a confession to make."

She couldn't help but worry about what he was going to say.  The way it was spoken made it sound like there was something that he wanted to get off his chest.

"I want to tell you something," he said.  And then he said, "I know you always loved cats."

And she answered, "Yes, daddy.  I love cats."  Pat had always had a cat.

"I hate cats."

Those were his last words.  He just wanted her to know how much he loved her to have tolerated all of his years living with a cat in the house.   He was such a great man.

I keep wondering when I am going to run out of things to say.  And then some friend calls and asks me a question, or tells me something funny and off I go again.

Monday was Becky's birthday.  She said, "Mom!!  How do you know that you wore a red dress to the hospital the day I was born!!! I can't even remember what I wore yesterday."

I had written her a happy birthday note describing that day back in 1959--and that I had worn a red dress to the hospital.  "Well," I answered, "I have a picture of that day that your dad took.  We almost didn't make it in time.  The nurse put me in a wheel chair, rolled me into delivery, and it was all over.  They didn't even have time to get a table set up to put you on, so they laid you on my stomach.  And you lifted your head up, looked around the room,  and said, "That was interesting, what's next."  Which is the story of your life."  It was a red letter, red dress day.  "Look at that baby," the nurses called out.  "She is lifting her head."
 
I had five children. That is enough.  Between them, I have ten grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.  I can't remember how old any of them are.  I have to go back to the year they were born and count from there.  I can't even remember all of their birthdays.  I can't imagine how hard it would be if there were more of them.

And with every birth, there is a story.  We come into the world, we live, hopefully we accomplish something good, and then we are gone.  Life is so precious.  But so short.  I have no idea where my life has gone.  I don't remember what went right nearly as well as what went wrong--and looking back is sometimes funny.

I'm not done yet.

I got an Email that my Son Scott wrote today that I thought was pretty neat.  He said, and I quote:

      I get a kick out of ignorant people that say that Jesus didn’t exist.  I ask them if Abe Lincoln existed, then George Washington.  And take them back to Genghis Khan, then on to Muhammad…..
      To a person, they will say that those people existed.  Then I ask them how they know they existed… “It is written down,” they will say.  “It is a piece of Historical FACT.”  Same old thing every time…

      I then ask them why they don’t believe that Jesus existed…. And they will say… “He is just a Bible myth”  “It’s just a story in the Bible to show us how to live…”

      I then tell them this…  “Oh, but he is mentioned in more than the Bible... His crucifixion, and his resurrection, are mentioned in more than the Bible… True, the most extensive and detailed descriptions of the life and death of Jesus are to be found in the New Testament gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John--with details supported by the other 23 books of the New Testament. However...contemporary Christian, Jewish, and Roman authors provide additional insight concerning the first-century Jewish and Roman legal systems and the details of scourging and crucifixion.  Seneca, Livy, Plutarch, and others refer to crucifixion practices in their works.

      But specifically, Jesus (and his crucifixion) is mentioned by the Roman historians Cornelius Tacitus, Pliny the Younger, and Suetonius.

      By non-Roman historians Thallus and Phlegon.
      By the satirist Lucian of Samosata.
      By the Jewish Talmud.
      And by the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus.
      Ancient Writings overwhelmingly support the Biblical account. It would be wise to accept that Jesus lived, died on the cross, and rose on the third day.  Multiple eyewitness accounts support that.
    
Scott is my research guru.  He is a good Biblical scholar. 

We are studying the book of Acts on Sundays.  Peter and John had healed a lame man--in the name of Jesus.  They were arrested and were thrown in jail for the night.  (The Romans had given legal power to the Jews to police themselves.   They were the same group that had told Pilot to crucify Jesus.  They wanted to stop Peter and John from preaching that Jesus was risen and that He still had the power to heal people.)  The next morning, John and Peter were brought before the high priest, his sons, and all of his relatives--as well as the rulers, elders, and scribes.   A ruling body.

Peter and John were placed in the middle of this group to answer this question, "In whose name was this done?"  That is, "Who did you call on to receive power to do this?"  Acts 4:7  (They could be severely punished for saying that it was Jesus.)   

So Peter, an uneducated fisherman speaks to this group of powerful educated men and tells them that he healed the man in the name of Jesus.  He furthermore tells them that they were the ones who killed Jesus.  The Messiah!!  Peter condemns the ruling powers--the Jewish high priest and all his flunkies.

Peter speaks with authority and when he is finished accusing them, the Jews are uncertain as to what they should do.  But it was not because of Peter's eloquence.

That morning, when Peter and John stood before this ruling body, someone came to stand beside them.  It was the man who had been healed.  A man that had been crippled from birth.  An unimportant person the day before, but today a witness who was willing to risk his life to testify in court.  "And beholding the man which was healed standing with them, they could say nothing against it."  Even an unimportant man who has been crippled since birth has a place in the plans of God. 

The lame man didn't say a word.  He just stood there--a testimony to the power of Jesus.  Sometimes we just need to stand up and be counted.

"There is an army base in Ft. Benning, Georgia," Ken said.  "Maybe they will have a hostess house where we can crash."  They didn't, but they had one room in the men's barracks with two single twin beds.  It was midnight.  We took it.  Ken and Scott slept head to toe in one bed and I sandwiched in between the two girls in the other one.  There was a twenty stall urinal connecting out one of the doors to our room.  None of us cared.  We were exhausted.

When we left Beaufort, Pat had a cat that she had adopted that day.  Scraggly. Woe-be-gone.  Pitiful. She begged her dad to let it go with us.  "No way," he said.  "No animals.  Especially a cat."  But he relented when she began to cry.  "Okay, you can bring the cat, but you are responsible to take care of it."  She assured him that she would. 

Somewhere between all of us in the two twin beds, the cat found a place to curl up--until six in the morning when it began to meow to get out.  So Pat slipped outside in her underwear, (all of our pajamas were long gone on the moving van) to let the cat out.  And of course, the cat crawled under the barracks and wouldn't come out.  Pat ran back in, woke Becky up and the two of them tried every trick they knew to get the cat out from under the barracks.  No luck.  By the time they gave up and Pat began to cry, we were all awake and Ken put on his Dress Blues and crawled under the barracks, got the cat, and crawled out--as a platoon of soldiers marched by in lock step.

Every one of those men saluted the Marine Lt. Col. who was lying flat on his stomach (in full Marine dress blue uniform), crawling out from under the barracks with a bedraggled cat in his arms--whose family were standing around watching--in their underwear.  Ken stood up, returned the salute, handed the cat to Pat and brushed off as much of the mud on his beautiful blue uniform that he could.  "You hold on that cat," he told her.  "I'm never going to rescue it again.  Ever."

True story.  You can't make this stuff up.