Mike G. Smith

I am a weather geek. No ifs, ands or buts about it. Everything about weather interests me.

So when my daughter sent me her photos of incoming early evening thunderstorms a few nights ago, I just had to write about them.

Those rays of sunlight that are shooting out of the tops of these clouds are called crepusclar rays, from the Latin word “crepusculum,” meaning twilight or dusk. One University of Massachusetts website even called them “Jesus rays.”

But what about the phenomena where the sun’s light appears to set the top of the clouds on fire? There’s no weather term for that, at least not that I could find.

But I have a name for it — the glory of God.

This sight reminds me of all the times in his Word when God used fire from heaven to illustrate his awesome power. The hail of burning sulphur God used to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah. The pillar of fire that led Israel during the night to the Promised Land. The fire Elijah called down from heaven to light the offering on the altar and kill the prophets of Baal. Not to mention the chariot of fire that took Elijah to heaven. And how did God choose to show the Holy Spirit resting on each of Jesus’ disciples in power on the day of Pentecost? That’s right – tongues of fire. 

Thanks be to God for this beautiful evening reminder.

Some afternoons, it just takes coffee to make it through.

Last Tuesday was that kind of afternoon.

That day, I decided to walk a different route from my office to the neighboring McDonalds, walking through our parking garage and exiting on the street a little closer to the restaurant than the door I usually use.

Just as I exited the garage, a homeless man was walking by on the same side of the street. He stopped me, said he needed bus fare to get to work, and asked if I had any money.  I looked him in the eye, gave him the dollar or so of change in my pocket, wished him a good day, and continued walking to McDonalds. He didn’t seem very pleased with the small amount, but said “thank you” anyway, and turned toward the bus stop just down the street.

This wasn’t a momentous encounter, or even a significant one. I didn’t give him a lot of money. We didn’t have a deep spiritual conversation. In fact, the whole thing was over in 15 seconds. I even forgot to ask him for his first name, a tactic my daughter uses with great success to let the person she’s talking to know they are valued.

No, I woudn’t even bring up this on-the-street meeting, if it weren’t for the fact that God has placed the Old Testament story of Ruth in front of me several times this week. What brought Ruth, a poor widow and the daughter-in-law of another poor widow, to that particular field in Bethlehem owned by Boaz? He was a wealthy relative of Ruth’s late father-in-law, and under Hebrew law, was one of the only men alive who could redeem Ruth.

It was all so ordinary. Ruth needed food for her and her mother-in-law, Naomi, and was gleaning grain at harvest time in the part of Boaz’s field reserved for the poor. And Boaz, as wealthy landowners will do from time to time, just “happened” to show up at the same time to see how his crops turned out that year.

Boaz saw Naomi working in the field, and the rest, as they say, is history. Actually, it’s “His story,” as Boaz and Ruth became grandparents in the human ancestral line of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.

So, I’m convinced that the meeting on Kansas Avenue in Topeka last Tuesday was a divine appointment. But what was God up to when I crossed paths with the homeless gentleman that afternoon?

I have no idea. But God knows.

I can only hope he was blessed by our brief encounter, by the small amount of money I gave to him, and by the respect I showed to him when we spoke. In retrospect, I also hope that our meeting will help me not to overlook any future “chance” meetings. And to be prayerfully ready for whatever God wants to come out of that meeting.

God has done some pretty big things with seemingly random encounters. And I don’t want to miss what He’s doing.

I loved when my wife and I attended the worship meetings for the network of house churches to which my son and his wife used to belong.

Every young man there (and they are all young men) had a beard of various lengths, and almost every young family has at least one child under the age of two.

That’s why I affectionately called it the “beards and babies” church.

I am of an earlier generation, one in which both the men, but especially the women, prefer clean shaven men. But I must admit, my son’s church was full of handsome men who sported beards as varied as the Don Johnson-like stubble (anyone remember his role in Miami Vice?) all the way to a full-on Willie Robertson “Duck Dynasty” beard. Any child in my son’s church saw only men with some sort of facial hair. I wonder if my future grandchild (due in July! Woo-hoo!) will ever understand that I am also a daddy, since I don’t have a beard.

Something else to ponder on this cold, wet Monday (a fellow blogger described this weather as “vile” – hat tip to you, Stephen Black and the Fractured Faith Blog):  The children of that church have this in common with the Christ child: the infant Jesus saw only bearded men.

Trivial? Yes.  Fun to think about? Yeah, that too.

My dad’s nearly 20-year battle with Parkinson’s disease ended last Sunday.

The pastor who delivered the message at Dad’s funeral asked me at dinner the night before, “So tell me, what are some of the lessons your Dad taught you over his lifetime?”

Of course, a question like that opened up the floodgate of memories. What surprised me was how many of those memories had a funny twist to them.

Because of my Dad, I know what it’s like to:

• Watch the sun rise over Atlantic Ocean in a tiny boat 30 miles off coast of Maryland, all the while nearly passing out from the smell of the boat’s diesel fuel.
• Eat PB&J sandwiches on a john boat in the middle of a lake while fishing, except that no fish were biting. None. Zero. Zilch. All day.
• Use old-fashioned hand warmers, fueled by lighter fluid (and not by chemical reaction as they are today) while sitting in a freezing cold tree blind, waiting for deer. I never even ever saw a deer, let alone shot at one, but we were there, waiting for them. Maybe they don’t like the smell of lighter fluid.
• Hear my Dad ask my Mom, in all seriousness, if she wanted him to “cut the cheese.” He did, after all, have a knife in one hand and a block of cheddar in the other. Being a child of the ’70s, I laughed about that for days (and obviously still do). He may or may not have known what I was laughing about.

There weren’t a lot of hunting and fishing excursions, so each one is burned indelibly into my memory. And these times would have been perfect for one of those father-son talks that help turn boys into men. But the “talks” didn’t happen. Dad was a man of few words, and talking just wasn’t his thing.

But what did happen in those times was real life. My Dad was always just himself.

In other words, the time I spent with him was the lesson.

While waiting quietly for a fish to bite, or in perfect silence for a deer to stroll by, I learned his patience and self-control. Sitting in that icy tree blind? There he showed me the value of being prepared, by making sure my hands stayed warm. As I fetched his tools while he worked on a car, I learned his attention to detail and desire to do a job well. And on that boat in the Atlantic, I learned his love for the beauty of nature and the serenity of being alone, miles from shore. I also learned that sometimes you have to endure the bad – in that case, nasty diesel fumes – to get the reward, seeing that huge orange orb emerging from the ocean, with a perfect copy of it floating right on top of the water.

Train up a child in the way he should go; even when he is old he will not depart from it.  — Proverbs 22:6 (ESV)

Thanks, Dad, for the “real life” training, the kind a dad gives to his son just by being with him. Your life spoke louder than any words could ever could.

Oh, and that “cut the cheese” thing? I didn’t learn anything from that. It was just funny.