Different versions of the same song

On my way home from work the other day, my Pandora station played the same Christmas song three times, by three different artists.

Turns out, that ain’t nuthin’.

Want to guess how many versions of the most-recorded Christmas song are floating around out there?

Hang on to your Santa hats.

Four years ago, an analysis of a music rights database revealed 137,315 recorded versions of “Silent Night,” according to Billboard Magazine.

That’s a lot of heavenly peace.

Turns out ― and this will probably not surprise anyone who turns on their radio any time between Thanksgiving and Dec 26 ― holiday hit rewrites are kinda popular.

The second-most-recorded holiday song, "White Christmas," topped 128,000 versions.

"Jingle Bells" ― the first song broadcast from space, the internet reports ― has been recorded nearly 90,000 ways, and “The Christmas Song,” with its chestnuts on an open fire, has lived 80,000 lives since first recorded by Nat King Cole in 1946.

You’d think, once those songs reached a few thousand remakes, the world would have been ready to move on to something else.

And, yet, we keep tuning in, turning it up, and tapping our toes as we listen – and listen again – to different versions of the same holiday songs.

From the radio roll the rich voices of Josh Groban, Andrea Bocelli, and Barbra Streisand, Harry Connick Jr. and Michael Buble, crooning the same holiday classics, over and over.

From Elvis and his sultry “Blue Christmas” to the breezy Beach Boys, everyone, it seems, eventually gets in on the Christmas album act.

We hear Christmas classics sung by John Denver and Neil Diamond, Mariah Carey and the Biebs.

The Jackson 5 and the Vince Guaraldi Trio. The Chipmunks and the Jingle Dogs.

Dean, Frank, Bing, and Ella. Mannheim Steamroller and the Trans-Siberian Orchestra.

Dolly, Kenny, and George Strait. Boyz II Men, New Kids on the Block, and NSYNC.

Kenny G and Pentatonix, Jim Nabors and Da Yoopers, all playing different versions of the same songs, over and over and over.

And we keep listening, keep loving, and keep singing along, Christmas after Christmas.

Of course, artists sometimes add new songs to the holiday canon, like the earworm “I Want a Hippopotamus for Christmas” and the inexplicable “What Can You Get a Wookiee for Christmas (When He Already Owns a Comb?),” from 1980’s “Christmas in the Stars: Star Wars Christmas Album.”

But it is the Silent Nights and Winter Wonderlands to which we turn again and again, year after year, happily accepting the next new artist ready to create one more version of the same song.

We like familiar.

We like belting out “Joy to the World” and “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” and knowing almost every word.

We like knowing that, even if the tune is a little jazzier or the tempo has slowed, the song remains the same, at its heart.

It still tells the same story, still holds out the same hope, still walks with us and comforts us and offers us joy, just as it has our whole lives.

At Christmas ― not the 2021 Christmas, but the original one, way back in the stable ― God wrote a new version of the song He’d been singing since the dawn of time.

In a scrunchy little baby, He told anew the same story written over and over throughout scripture, from the ark to the cross.

I see you, He said to us.

I know you.

I love you.

In the silent night we hold so dear, our Creator gets up close and personal, stepping onto Earth to make sure we hear Him and to be what we cannot so we can be His.

I see you, He sings. I know you. And I love you.

We sway to the rhythm of His Christmastime song, leaning on its familiarity, ready to hear it again, and again, in as many ways as He’s willing to tell us.

I know you, God’s love song whispers as we navigate our days. I see you, it hums when skies turn dark. I love you, it says, in new ways and old, melodies changed and yet the same, swirling around our hearts and inviting us to sing along.

And, in us, it bursts into infinite varieties as we carry it to those around us, each listening ear and welcoming smile and open heart a new version of the same familiar song.

I see you, know you, love you, we say to one another, setting toes tapping with joy.

That’s a song worth hearing 137,000 ways, and then some.

First published in The Alpena News on Dec. 11, 2021.

Walks with Books

If I fall off a curb, it’s my boss’s fault.

A new time-keeping system recently introduced at my workplace requires those of us who punch in for a living to punch out for lunch.

After several years of merrily sidestepping breaks to pack more accomplishment into my day, I initially grumped about being ousted from the office for an hour.

It’s growing on me, though.

For the past few weeks, I’ve been taking to the streets, book in hand, for an almost-daily midday stroll.

Peripheral vision has saved me from several collisions with passing pedestrians as I reclaimed a favorite pastime of my youth and wandered downtown Alpena neighborhoods, directionless, with my nose buried in a book.

For a delightful 45 minutes at a shot, I stroll along sidewalks, delighting in the acidic wit of Jane Austin or fighting epic battles alongside the old man and the sea.

My current read, John Green’s achingly beautiful “The Anthropocene Reviewed”, almost got me run over the other day when I stopped in my tracks in the middle of an intersection to laugh and weep at the same time.

Other books await their turn for a walkabout: a heartbreaking Jonathan Safran Foer young adult novel I need to read again, a Neil Simon play, Bill Bryson to make me giggle, a biography of my favorite Russian writer.

Some books, I’ve decided, simply don’t lend themselves to a walk-and-read, usually because their unwieldy size would prove awkward for a girl on the move.

Take, for example, my dad’s Bible.

I keep it tucked unobtrusively next to my desk at work, wrapped in its black, zippered cover. The book’s thin pages would flop in my hands as I walked, I think.

Then again, it survived a lifetime walk in the hands of my read-more, learn-more, history-buff father.

At the dinner table, Dad would regale my brother and me with the rollicking stories he made come alive from the Old Testament’s pages: Absalom and his deadly headful of hair, fat King Eglon done in by a lefty, determined Jael and her well-placed tent peg, the golden hemorrhoids (look it up!).

I’ve never known someone to take such delight in a book, or to know it so well. Dad taught me the joy in the Bible’s deep humanity, the way it delves into the minutiae and ridiculousness of human life and shows us that we matter, unfathomably, to a Great, Big God.

Another such book sits on my living room side table, occasionally serving as a resting spot for a cat.

Enfolded in a green cover decorated with elegant embroidery, my mom’s Bible bears witness to the many walks she took among its pages.

Her open, teacher-ish handwriting fills the margins, some scribbles in pencil, others in blue pen.                                                          

Underlines and stars and exclamation points and arrows emphasize the words she believed quietly but firmly, the truths she lived along her walk as she gave and forgave and fought for the underdog and loved the downtrodden with her hands as well as her heart, the way her Book told her she was loved and forgiven and fought for.

On my lunchtime meanders and as I delve into a day, the books of my parents walk alongside me and in me and make me who I am.

I don’t spend as much time among their pages as I ought. I reach for Dostoyevsky or Hemingway instead of Moses or Paul, and those precious zippered covers sometimes gather more dust than I’d like to admit.

Though I neglect the books, they never neglect me. 

They whisper in my ear as I walk from day to day, telling me to love and be loved, speaking to my heart of humility and hope and purpose in the darkness.

Clocking out has its advantages. 

A little encouragement to take a break for a deep breath and a dose of fresh perspective is, perhaps, not such a bad thing.

Especially if you have a Good Book along for the walk.

First published in The Alpena News on Nov. 14, 2021.

The fences in our bellies

 My favorite tree had a fence in it.

Politely standing sentry at the edge of a park on Alpena’s northeast side, the unassuming Manitoba maple (my son just finished a leaf project in his high school botany class, so I made him identify it for me) wasn’t the sort of tree that made you long to climb its limbs or rest against its warm trunk.

It bore no particular beauty to make a passerby look twice.

It did have a fence in it, though.

The tree was one of many that grew up alongside a chain-link fence bordering someone’s back yard. Rooty feet planted on the south side of the fence, it had grown right through the wires, swallowing the links in its trunk as it emerged out the other side.

From a distance, it looked much like any other tree. Only a slight curve, where it had righted itself after its run-in with the wires, betrayed that it had a fence in its belly.

***

Some of my favorite people have fences in them.

Somewhere back in time, people I love found themselves up against it. In a tough place. Beaten down by fear, by addiction, by pain, by despair.

Today, those barriers, for those people I love, have faded into the past, but they’re not gone.

They’re simply swallowed up, mid-trunk, now a part of the person my people have become.

Some people grow straight and tall, their paths never impeded, their perfect trunks the glory of the woods.

I can’t help loving the crooked people best, though.

The ones with fences in them.

The ones who carry their pasts in their bellies but determinedly grow on, accepting what was and facing toward what will be.

***

Recently, I went back to visit my tree.

Someone had cut it down.

I don’t fault whoever did it. They probably just wanted to clean the fence up a little ― and, it turns out, people don’t love the species as much as I loved my tree.

Online writers call the Manitoba maple “invasive, weedy, messy.”

“Manitoba maples grow everywhere, mostly where you don't want them,” one site says.

“Never plant Manitoba maples unless nothing else will grow!” another cautions.

Of course, the trees have their upside, too. They make lovely carved bowls and other turned-wood creations, according to the internet.

Unlike many other tree species, Manitoba maples produce separate male and female trees ― which is probably pretty cool, although, let's be honest, I don’t know what that means and, frankly, don’t want to know.

All of that matters not. What matters is that my tree had a fence in it.

And someone cut it down.

I patted what was left of my tree’s gray trunk, cried, told it it had been strong and brave. I smelled it, took its picture, shuffled the wood chips on the ground with the toe of my shoe, cried a little more.

The nice couple passing on the sidewalk walked a little faster.

The thing is ― I wanted that tree to be OK.

I wanted to believe trees with fences in them can make it.

Look around you. 

How many fence-middled trees do you think are out there? The people you know, the people you love, the people you work with, and the strangers at the grocery store ― how many of them could tell you about the fence in their past, the one they leaned into because there was no other way, the one that hurt and befuddled and seemed insurmountable until they somehow landed on the other side?

How many of them are who they are because of what they’ve grown through?

We expect people to make sense and do right and obey traffic laws and make good decisions. And, time after time, they do. People are amazing. But they’re not amazing because they’re amazing ― they’re amazing because they go to work and wash the dishes and feed the cats and stop at stop signs and bake chocolate chip cookies with fences in their bellies that nobody will ever see but them.

They keep going. They keep growing. They live.

It floors me, truly. People every day face barriers small and large and impossible and they just keep going.

It’s so lovely it hurts.

And, when life upends and a virus separates and anger ignites and headlines horrify, somehow, people keep going.

They make it to the other side.

And the Everyday Faith part of all this is simply this: shout-out to God for making humans.

And trees.

And fences.

Even the ones we have to grow through.

First published in The Alpena News on October 30, 2021.

Look

I recently became the proud owner of a super-cute, cherry red, simple-but-durable kayak.

The Yak now travels atop my intrepid Jeep Liberty, always ready to explore with me the delights of Northeast Michigan’s inland lakes and streams.

Buggy somethings skitter across the surface and frogs rustle the reeds as I slide into the water.

A beaver industriously ignores me while a sunbathing turtle, at my approach, toddles to the water’s edge, sticks his head underwater, and hopes I won’t notice him.

A startled swan lifts giant wings, then runs -- runs! -- across the water and launches, honking like a Model T Ford.

Another swan -- no, wait, a white heron -- poses like art, its long neck stretched to the sky.

A deer, chest-deep in water, placidly chews a lily pad.

Below the surface, however, lurk dark, terrifying unknowns.

A disclaimer, here: To my knowledge, the various bodies of water in and around Alpena contain no actual submerged creepiness.

Here’s the thing, though -- while I love paddling around on top of it, the underwater part of water freaks me right out. Even as a kid, I had to move the bubbles aside to make sure nothing but dishes hung out at the bottom of a sinkful of dishwater.

From the safety of my kayak, I can tolerate the occasional fish backing shyly into a forest of lake plants, and, if I think reassuring thoughts, I can ignore the strings of bubbles marking the presence of unseen creatures moving in the darkness below.

Sometimes, though, I have no choice but to paddle over a submerged tree trunk or branch, looming through the green of the water.

Egad. Horrifying.

Stomach in knots, heart pounding, I whisper, “Don’t look, don’t look, don’t look” as I flutter past the log in a near-panic, eyes desperately averted.

(Yes, I know. It’s ridiculous. Hey, we all have our weirdnesses.)

When I encounter something frightening, I look the other direction and furiously pretend the scary thing doesn’t exist -- even when I’m not in a kayak.

The daunting task. The bill I don’t know how to pay. The sentence I don’t want to speak. I fear them, so I avert my eyes and act like they’re not there.

I suspect most of us have gotten pretty good at not seeing that which makes us uncomfortable.

The unkempt woman muttering to herself in the store aisle.

The young man with a tentative swagger as he walks a downtown sidewalk alone.

The coworker with sparkling laugh and sassy comeback and eyes full of sadness.

The curly-headed boy following his father up the steps of the homeless shelter.

We don’t know how to help, and we have troubles enough of our own, so we pass by with a silent, “Don’t look, don’t look, don’t look.”

Yet, we, ourselves, imperfect and muddled, are seen with loving eyes by a Savior who sought out the low and the despised and the wretched, the sick and the sordid, the lonely and the desperate, and told them they mattered.

None of us are overlooked by the One who did not look away from the looming tree in His path but strode to the cross to make the least of us His brothers and sisters.

Despite my weirdness and foolishness and insignificance, my Maker sees me, wants me, rushes to tell me He loves me, and offers to stay by my side as I walk through whatever each day brings.

I don’t want to see the things I ought to be doing better, the wrongs against which I ought to take a stand, the people to whom I ought to be showing love.

I don’t want to look at the problems in my world that frighten me.

But they’re there, whether I turn my eyes to them or not.

Good Lord, make me see as you see. Help me love. Help me reach. Help me do what’s right.

Give me the courage to look.

First published in The Alpena News on September 11, 2021.

The child inside

 Part of me really thought I was going to wake up feeling like an adult.

Perhaps, as they say, age is just a number. But, as of a few weeks ago, my number is 50, and that feels significant, with “significant” being a euphemism for “old.”

Now, before some of you shake your heads at me and call me a youngster compared to your greater accumulation of years, remember this: you once turned 50, and I’ll wager it seemed a big number to you, too, at the time.

I could tell I was nearing over-the-hill status when my knee started hurting. Maybe it’s arthritis, but I’m going to go ahead and pretend it’s a sports injury, despite the fact that the most sporty thing I do is wearing sweatpants while eating my evening bowl of ice cream.

My husband, who brings in the mail, delights in making sure the increasingly frequent mailings touting the joys of retirement are on top of the pile on the kitchen table, and my kids make old-person jokes when I squint at small print and conk out five minutes into a Saturday night movie.

It only seems right that, if my body is determined to tell me I’m getting older, the rest of me ought to follow suit, don’t you think?

When I swam to consciousness the morning of my birthday, I shoved the mop of sleep-hair out of my face, remembered the date, and breathed in a little, hopeful gasp.

Maybe today would be the day.

If I’m 50 -- and I’m pretty sure I am -- that means I’ve spent the past 37 years walking around feeling like a 13-year-old.

For as long as I can remember, my Inner Me has been solidly centered at that awkward age, all knees and elbows and insecurities flying every-which-way.

My outer layers have grown older, with varying degrees of success, and I even manage to pass as a competent adult much of the time.

Inside, though, there’s a young girl who’s unsure of the world, afraid of herself, desperate to be seen and wanting to hide, longing to love and be loved, hopelessly ungainly and susceptible to emotional roller coasters that would make any amusement park proud.

On my 50th birthday, though...mightn’t that be the day when I finally, finally, felt like a grown-up?

Nope.

Turns out that big number holds no more magic than any other age, and the me of 50 is the same 13-year-old in disguise as the me of the past half a century.

If a milestone birthday doesn’t nudge a person out of childhood -- if even busily “adulting,” going to work and paying taxes and shopping for laundry detergent, doesn’t make you feel like an adult -- what, then, does it take to finally feel like a real, honest-to-goodness, properly grown-up human being?

Or … are adults actually all 13-year-olds, waiting to grow up?

I truly don’t know. Maybe the well-spoken, businessy, have-it-all-together people I see every day actually are as confident and competent as they seem.

Or, maybe we’re all a little bit of a mess inside, insecure and uncertain and hoping someone loves us.

Gotta be honest -- I kinda hope it’s not just me.

I wonder -- since I’m permitted, as an official old person, to wax philosophical -- if we mightn’t all be better off if we remembered we might be surrounded by 13-year-olds.

Under the veneer of adulthood, the people we see every day might be full of insecurities and vulnerabilities and yearnings and scars.

Maybe -- I can’t say for sure, but maybe -- everyone has a child inside, desperate to be loved.

Reaching to be understood, my insides wonder: Did Jesus have an inner 13-year-old?

Goodness, I don’t know. But I do know He had a special place in His heart for people who didn’t have it all together.

He hung out with the broken, the rejects, the ones who climbed up a tree because they felt small inside. He wept for the broken hearts around Him. His friends, those He pulled closest, were impulsive, weak, insecure, foolish -- in other words, a lot like me.

If 50 didn’t do the trick, I don’t have much hope I’m ever going to shake the awkwardness and uncertainty and yearnings of the won’t-grow-up young person inside me.

Perhaps it's time to make peace with her.

To accept her as part of me, and to ask her help in seeing with compassion the fears and insecurities in the people around me.

To take her by the shoulders and tell her she is deeply, endlessly, unconditionally loved -- messed-up little thing that she is -- by a man and a God who did everything to make her His.

Toms

The man with the needle looked more nervous than I was.

He pawed through paperwork, then picked up the syringe between inexpert fingertips and fumbled for a cleaning wipe. He was gray at the temples, kind-looking, and definitely not a medical professional.

His name was Tom, and his name tag said hello. He gave my arm a swipe.

I eeped a bit when the needle got close to my arm, but the actual injection didn’t hurt a bit. Afterward, Tom produced a bandage, taking his best guess at where it should go when the injection site got lost among the freckles on my arm.

As I walked away, Tom shifted in his folding chair and got ready for the next person.

With his blue denim shirt and uncertain smile, he seemed out of place in a makeshift medical clinic in an empty mall storefront. I wish I’d asked him how many vaccinations he’d given, or what he did when he wasn’t putting new life in people’s arms.

Tom wasn’t a pro at the vaccination thing, that was clear.

I think, maybe, he was just a guy who had volunteered to help, and they handed him a needle, and he said, “OK.”

Nice guy, that Tom.

As of Friday, more than 170 million doses of the COVID-19 vaccine had been administered in the U.S., with about 5 million of those going into Michiganders’ arms.

Each one of those doses was given by a set of hands.

How many Toms would it take to poke 170 million needles into 170 million arms?

That’s a lot of Toms.

Somewhere, out there, a whole slew of people who don’t know exactly what they’re doing, haven’t been trained as superheroes, and may be squeamish about jabbing people with needles are feeling a little nervous.

Yet, there they are, shuffling papers and sitting on uncomfortable folding chairs and slapping on bandages and healing the world.

Toms are beautiful.

Of course, Toms aren’t relegated to vaccine clinics.

Everywhere you look, people are poking those around them to make sure they’re OK.

A coworker, having a bad day herself, sends a caring text.

A church member brings you a plate of cookies.

A trusted voice offers words of guidance, even though they are difficult to say.

Someone you barely know picks up a phone to tell you you did something right.

Staggering, the power of those little pokes.

They give life.

Granted, the people doing the poking may not be experts at it, and they may fumble a bit. Their pokes may pinch, and they may miss the mark when applying a bandage.

But they’re doing it, by golly.

All around, lovely people are taking little stands, speaking little truths, holding up what’s right and resolutely choosing kindness and empathy and forgiveness, reaching beyond themselves into lives of others who need them, even if it’s only with a word, or a nod, or a smile above a mask.

It tugs the heart, thinking of all those people, all those pokes.

The God who made a world and washed it with a flood and washed it again with the blood of HIs Son doesn’t just sit on a cloud and watch us crawl about, hurting and befuddled.

He doesn’t just say He loves us and then call it good enough.

He comes to us, God does. He invests in our lives, gets up close and personal, injects His love into our day-to-days to help us be OK.

And He does it by using people.

The Toms who sit on a folding chair all day, smiling comfortingly. The tired grocery store clerks who say, “Have a nice day,” and mean it. The friends and coworkers and strangers who say what needs to be said, offering doses of kindness and compassion and truth.

I bet they don’t know they’re giving God-pokes.

In the middle of muddling through life, it’s easy to not notice all the goodness around us, the kindness and courage and determination in the people who people our world. Hubbub and discord can blind us to the love that’s flowing toward us from all sides through the hands and words and hearts of beautiful humans who, in the midst of plugging away at their own lives, pause to take care of one another.

One syringe at a time, willing hands are bringing new life to the world.

One person at a time, the God who gives life offers booster shots, enabling His children to reach into the lives of others with love made visible, Toms everywhere.

Perhaps, today, I can give a poke, too.

First published in The Alpena News on April 10, 2021.

Ice mountains and forgiveness

 Mountains gotta be climbed, am I right?

One of the best parts of living in Northeast Michigan is the wicked-cool ice hills that appear like a miniature mountain range, complete with volcanoes, along the Rogers City-area Lake Huron shore in winter.

If you haven’t ever taken time to go see them, you really should. Just sayin’.

Now, one can’t just LOOK at an awesome ice hill, can one? I mean, given the chance, doesn’t one just HAVE to try to scramble to the top?

One does.

That’s why, a few Sundays ago, I found myself square on my rump, yelping in pain.

I knew the ice was too slippery. I’d already fallen once.

But, like Everest, the hill was there, begging to be climbed -- and, I told myself with a jaunty toss of my scarf, I was just the girl to climb it.

To my credit, I reached the top.

And then I hit the bottom -- in more ways than one.

If I hadn’t been carrying my camera, I might have fallen more efficiently. With precious cargo to protect, though, I thumped to my rump with all the grace of a sack of potatoes.

Ever had a tailbone injury?

They’re a pain in the rear.

You can’t put a bandage on a tailbone. Can’t wrap it in a splint or put it in a sling. A couple of ibuprofen take the edge off, but you still wince when you stand up.

Or sit down.

Or sneeze.

It’s all painful, really. Lounging on the couch with a cat on your lap? Hurts. Sitting on a hard church pew for an hour? Whimper.

(Hot tip -- shoving a glove behind the small of your back during a 45-minute drive to work helps a little; not sure why.)

The good thing is, I’ve learned my lesson. With a sore bum to remind me of the folly of trodding on slippery slopes, I’m going to stay off the ice from now on.

Giggle.

No, I’m not. I may be walking gingerly now, but I’m still the same old dingaling who’s going to charge right up the next ice hill she sees.

Because that’s what we humans do, isn’t it?

Do something dumb, reap the rerpercussions, do the dumb thing again.

Act pridefully, get called out on it, feel rotten, act pridefully again.

Say words better left unsaid, writhe in agonies, say the wrong thing again.

Hurt a loved one, vow to do better, hurt them again.

Little ice hills all around us, and we can’t stay off of them, no matter how many times we land on our rears.

I wish the nagging residue of our downfalls were enough to keep us on solid ground the next go-round, but, somehow, the lessons of the ache we feel and the hurt we cause disappear, and up the slippery slopes we go again.

Again and again, we slip and fall and wince and climb.

And, again and again, we are forgiven by a God who, surely, must shake His head at us and wonder why on Earth we can’t learn our lesson.

Truly, God is a puzzle. He sees -- like nobody else can see -- our falls, our little resolutions to do better, our foolishness and forgetfulness and inability to learn.

And He still loves us.

It doesn’t make sense.

Again and again, we do the wrong thing. And, again and again, though we expect any moment He’s going to declare enough is enough and wash His hands of us, He picks us up, points us in the right direction, and says He’s there to help us to do better next time.

Again and again, aching and wishing I were a better person, I look to the cross and wonder why I’m loved and close my eyes and lean into forgiveness so incredibly undeserved.

The hurt that tails after foolishness ain’t fun. And it doesn’t always keep us from being foolish again.

But, pain in the rear though it may be, it is a reminder -- with every uncomfortable twinge and poke -- that we are fools, but we are forgiven.

Again and again and again.

First published in The Alpena News on March 13, 2021.