John Fischer The Catch

Rain can ruin your weekend,
And rain can spare your life,
Depending on who you are,
And what your thirst is like.
– from “Some Folks’ World” by Mark Heard

The rain continues to fall here in southern California. Going on four days now. I feel like I’m in Seattle. Marti doesn’t like the rain but I secretly love it. I’ve been trying to figure out why, but I’m not there yet. It’s something that has to do with nature and God and me interacting. The rain on the roof or constantly dribbling on the gutter is like speech. It’s nature talking. I will feel lonely when it stops. Why is that? Maybe David can help.

“Day to day pours forth speech, and night to night reveals knowledge” (Psalm 19:2). The psalmist seems to think like I do. He believes that the supernatural speaks to him through the natural. That there is a steady stream of communication going on here, and he who has ears to hear may understand it.

So what is the rain saying? One thing’s for sure: it is saying different things to different people. To my son and his big sister up in Big Bear right now trying to snowboard in the rain, it is not saying the same thing it is saying to me here in my office enjoying its steady banter. To the homeless trying to find a dry place to sleep tonight, it is not saying the same thing as it is saying to the tomato farmer in the central valley. Yet it is speaking nonetheless.

Life has hard lessons. My full-hearted weekend with my family clashed with the intense pain of a woman who lost her husband of 36 years. The rain falls equally on the just and the unjust and who can know it?

The important thing is to listen to what God is saying through whatever is going on in your life, good and bad. And the important thing is to thirst for God, for truth, and for obedience in everything. It’s all important, and it’s all from him, and it’s up to us to find out what the message is.

My heart is full right now and I’m not sure why.

Maybe it’s having my whole family around me for the first time in a long time. The holidays do have a way of creating these special moments.

Maybe it’s the moments sitting and talking around the fire. (Maybe it’s the fire that we don’t often take the time to build and enjoy except for times like these.)

Maybe it’s the rain that’s been falling steadily now these three days – so unusual for southern California. The constant rattling of raindrops on the gutter outside my window is somehow a soothing reminder that we are not alone on this planet. Someone is there, rattling our lives, soothing our sorrows, engulfing us with his presence.

Maybe it’s remembering that a God we could never picture, fathom or understand actually came down to our level and joined the human caravan so we could see him, touch him, talk to him, record his words, debate his existence, and do whatever else we need to do to find him out and ultimately believe.

Maybe it’s imagining all that wonder embodied in a tiny, vulnerable baby who can’t get his own food, can’t clean up his own messes, can’t talk or walk, can only eat, sleep, and cry. Imagine the God of the universe in such a state. What a strange and wonderful thing. Who could have thought up such a story other than God himself?

Maybe it’s because of a groundswell of bedrock belief in my heart that God will provide, in whatever way he chooses, but he will provide what I need to be who I was intended to be, and he will do the same for you.

Maybe it’s really all of these things. Like I said, my heart is full.

Marti gave you her perspective on Wednesday night’s Isaiah House Christmas for women without homes, but I don’t think anyone can touch the experience I had looking through the eyes of Santa Claus.

Of course the roll of Santa fell to me. Someone had to pass out the gifts, and I have been the source of entertainment for the last few Women of Vision dinners, an elaborate gesture that comes from being the husband of Marti Fischer, and one willing to do whatever she says (it’s her event, at least I think it is).

So I donned my red and white suit, strapped on my beard and hair and took to “Ho-ho-ho”ing through the food line and out the kitchen door to the patio where most of the women eat and some sleep for the night. After leading a few rounds of carols, I announced it was time for everyone to get out their little bubble-makers and start blowing bubbles. (It was the closest thing you could get to snow in southern California.) As soon as I announced that we had to have plenty of bubbles or else Santa’s sleigh wouldn’t arrive, they all stepped up their bubbling, and by golly, Marti was right: it did look like it was snowing.

Then I gave the signal to my two elves (Chandler and his friend Ryan) to open the back gate where our friend Lane was waiting with the bed of his big diesel pickup completely full of gift bags, 120 of then to be exact, mostly all provided by you. As he backed into the patio, I jumped up into the truck and rode it in, waving and shouting “Merry Christmas!” and “Ho ho ho!”

I had wondered what would happen next, worried that most of them might keep their distance and wait for me to bring them their gifts. But no, they flocked to me like children, wide-eyed and yet still tentative, only because they couldn’t believe it was all really for them. So one at a time, I thrust two bags into their arms with a “Merry Christmas!” and they received them with a certain amount of disbelief, as if this couldn’t possible be right. Santa must have gotten the wrong address. We’re all bad; we don’t deserve this. And then one by one, to a woman, each one said brightly and genuinely, “Thank you, Santa!”

And I wish you could have seen their faces when they said it. It’s all I need for ten Christmases, just to remember those faces. Bright, happy, almost stunned with joy without a shred of cynicism or doubt. It was as if each one was saying with her eyes, “For me?”

As I made the rounds later, they were reading and re-reading the cards you included, cherishing the personal messages from strangers, no longer estranged.

“Santa,” someone cried out, “Barbara needs a hug.” So I went over and gave Barbara a big Santa hug and felt her sobbing in my arms. Oh no, I thought, what have we done now. Then she said, “These are mostly good tears.” Relieved, I looked for more of an explanation. “This is good stuff!”  She said in disbelief, as she looked over her new boxed set of hair and body products; and with that comment, I realized why she cried. Someone had treated here with respect and dignity. Someone had given her what they would have chosen for themselves, not something discarded, or something no one else wanted.

And somehow I think, even if for just that moment, these women all felt the same way… chosen, not discarded.

[The Isaiah House Christmas was a huge success, thanks to many of you who gave gifts. Marti and I came home full, and both wrote about our experience. I’ve chosen to put hers first. Mine will come tomorrow.]

All my working life I have held and acted on the deepest conviction about “giving,” whether one calls it charity, mercy, philanthropy, duty or some other word. It’s a conviction I can readily implement in a national campaign, but cannot, for the life of me, put into words.

It is a picture in my head, some very glorious and high attribute that is too wonderful for me to do anything but stutter about. So I have pursued the power of the mighty and the funds of those who give freely with this nearly incommunicable belief that it is their weakness and poverty that I am seeking to crack, like a chrysalis.  It doesn’t always happen, and monies and actions do their good anyway. But this vision – call it a desire to see the immediate effects and proof of the proposition that it is actually more blessed to give than to receive – is what has always driven me, and when it is realized brings a magical satisfaction.

When it works right, the manner of the gift is a positive transformation for the giver – what we might call a redemptive thing. Some intended grace and joy, some spiritual substance or other that I will never articulate well, is restored to the giver as their gift leaves their hands.

There are other multiplications. Something transpires between the giver and the recipient which transforms both in some way not measurable in fishes or loaves.

And some element of the gift speaks to the one receiving it at a deep level of need, so immediately felt if you are poor and outcast. Loaves and fishes, yes, and with them crowns and signets, tokens of significance.

So people of moderate means heard about there being no Christmas at Leia’s Isaiah House, and went to find their poverty to give lavishly out of it with a heart-release of cards and letters and stories to women completely unknown to them. And small crowns and signets were arranged and wrapped, and earnest words so carefully read, in a setting of decency and momentary freedom from sheer circumstantial oppression, so that it all could be received.

The multiplication was there on all sides, and it took so very, very little to do.

The air is cold. The stars speckled the sky. These good women, having drawn a hard lot, somehow misplaced and driven out to its forgotten edges, while they recognize that they stand on the holiest of ground, their home is where they aren’t right now.

Squinting up to the almost cloud-covered North Star one woman said to me, “I know it doesn’t seem like it, but we are looking for the answers too.

Thank you, my very dear friends, for the generous gifts of personal worth.

Tonight we will bring a trunk load of gifts to the women at Isaiah House, thanks to so many of you. Your response has been overwhelming. We will be able to give two generous gift bags to each woman there. We can’t thank you enough. It will be a joyous surprise. Pray for all the logistics. It’s going to be a neat trick getting everything accomplished in the short amount of time they give for dinner.

Sorry for the short Catch today but we’re exhausted getting everything ready. You will all be in our thoughts tonight. Thanks again for making this possible.

“Praise the Lord, the God of Israel, because He has visited and redeemed His people… Because of God’s tender mercy, the morning light from heaven is about to break upon us to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, and to guide us to the path of peace.” (Luke 1:68, 78-79)  — spoken by the Zechariah the priest, after receiving his voice back at the presentation of his son, John the Baptist.

Time for yet another Chandler Christmas story. Have I told you that Marti is into Christmas in a big way? Yes, even the Santa part. When they get old enough to figure it out, we teach our children that Santa is a mythical character based on a real person, Saint Nicholas, who started a tradition of bringing gifts to poor children on Christmas Eve. Of course all of this gift giving springs from God’s greatest gift to us in his son, Jesus Christ. Still, we play along with the Santa Claus story and indulge in the magic of make believe.

One year in New England when our first two were right at the age of figuring things out, I created an impressive showing on a landing on our roof visible from a dormer window. I used a ladder to make two indentions in the snow for “rails” of a sleigh, and a whole bunch of reindeer “prints” out in front. Christopher and Anne told me later that I really had them wondering for a while about that one.

An official visit to Santa is one of our non-negotiable family traditions no matter how old the kids are. So that means that Santa gets Anne on one lap (something I bet he looks forward to) and Chandler on the other and Christopher standing nearby. Yes, it will happen again this year.

It’s only been a few years since Chandler pulled Marti aside as we left Santa’s house and whispered in her ear, “That’s not the real Santa.” When Marti asked him what made him think that, he said, “His boots are fake.” But then the priceless part was when he went on to whisper, “But don’t tell Christopher and Anne; they’d be so disappointed.”

I’ve got a lot to learn from this kid. My tendency, when I am the first to catch some fallacy like this is to blurt out my finding in front of everybody with no thought to the bigger picture. Chandler took into account the bigger picture, and though we can laugh at it today, it was truly a loving act he performed.

I think of how often my first answer to any request from my children is almost always “No.” I’m not suggesting it should be “Yes” either, but what would be best is to be affirming of their request and buy some time to discuss it and consider it so when I do answer, my “Yes” is “Yes” and my “No” is “No.” “Yes” by way of “No” is not what Jesus was talking about (Matthew 5:37).

Believe it or not, there’s more than just the truth. There is love. Truth and love must go together. The truth can crush if there is no love behind it. Love can drift if there is no truth to guide it. “Instead, speaking the truth in love, we will grow to become in every respect the mature body of him who is the head, that is, Christ” (Ephesians 4:15).

Four years ago, the first gift to be opened on Christmas was in some ways the greatest, and the most sought after. It was probably the simplest gift as well. It didn’t take any time to shop for or any money to purchase. Our son, Chandler, then 7, had found a CD in his big sister’s room, and on his own initiative and without anyone’s knowledge, he wrapped it up for her for Christmas, and put it under the tree. When he insisted that she open it first, we assumed it was something he had made for her in school.

So when Anne unwrapped the first gift of Christmas, 2006, we were all both stunned and relieved to find the Emergency Medical Technician training DVD that she had been desperately looking for ever since Chandler turned it into a Christmas present. The loss was holding up her timeline for applying to medical school, and we all had been recruited to search for it. Chandler had simply found it first and decided it would make a good Christmas gift. It was certainly something she wanted; that much was true.

As you might imagine, upon opening her “gift,” Anne experienced a strong desire to both strangle Chandler and love him at the same time. Here he had wrapped up something she already had, made her suffer over the loss of it, and then gave it back to her as a gift — the gift part being the only thing he was really conscious about.

It occurs to me that this would be a foolproof way of giving someone what you know they will want for Christmas. Take away something they value, and then give it back for Christmas. Sounds like a dirty trick, but in some ways, this is just what God has done with us. He took away from the human race, that which was its most valuable possession — complete and open communication with God himself — and left us with a big hole in our hearts instead. And though we brought this on ourselves through disobedience, he provided a way he could reestablish that communication by sending Christ to us — his coming, of course, being the primary event we celebrate at Christmas.

So we lost our relationship with God and ever since we have been searching for what we once had, and on Christmas morning, we symbolically find it again in the coming of Christ — the first gift. Yes, the first gift of Christmas will always be Jesus.

Jesus was born amidst a good deal of struggle to believe. There was doubt and disbelief surrounding His birth, even as there is today when He is born anew in someone.

It takes two different accounts to piece the story together (Luke 1:26-38; Matthew 1:18-24), and factoring in the human element, it’s hard to imagine it was all sweetness and light. There were two angelic visitations, one to Mary (called the Annunciation by the Catholic and Orthodox Churches) and one to Joseph, and it’s pretty clear that Mary got hers first, because Joseph was contemplating divorcing her over the disgrace of her pregnancy. It’s hard to imagine Mary not telling Joseph about her visit with the angel, and assuming she told him, it’s equally hard to imagine Joseph believing her.

I mean there aren’t too many options for a father here. There’s Joseph, someone else, or God. If you were Joseph, which one would you believe? I would call God the long shot at best. And even if Joseph could believe Mary, I doubt anyone else would. So you have a good deal of tension that was relieved, at least for the two of them, in Joseph’s eventual visitation confirming Mary’s story. That did nothing to quell the public pressure, but you can endure anything if you are convinced yourself.

There are at least two lessons I can think of that this story teaches. 1) Believe what people tell you about their spiritual experiences. Who are we to judge? As a matter of fact, believing people, period, is usually the best way to go. If they are lying, the truth will eventually come out without you having to train yourself in suspicion, or turn yourself into someone who can’t trust anybody. “Love… always trusts” (1 Corinthians 13:7).

2) Resist the temptation to make assumptions about people. Imagine the assumptions going on around Mary and Joseph. It most likely went on most of their lives.

When Chandler was a newborn, I remember doing Christmas shopping for my wife and taking my daughter, Anne, with me. This was Chandler’s first Christmas, so he was a little over 3 months old, and Anne was 18. Dad, at 52, got more than a few winks and behind the back thumbs-up from male store clerks. I just smiled and let them believe whatever they wanted to believe. Of all the options that could have produced this odd threesome, the truth was probably the farthest from anyone’s mind—that they were both my kids. I try to remember that experience when I’m tempted to jump to conclusions about people.

If we live in assumptions all the time, we miss what God is doing, because He usually works outside of the obvious. Don’t assume anything where God is concerned. Stay wide-eyed and filled with wonder. Don’t let the highly touted commercialization of the season ruin Christmas for you. It’s a believer’s celebration, all the way around.

It’s that time of year. Time for twinkling lights and jingling bells and announcements ringing from angelic choirs. Time to wrestle boxes from where they’ve been hiding for the last 11 months and find out what’s in them—expected memories and perhaps some forgotten surprises. Time to set up the shepherds once more under the sagging eaves of what was most surely a leaky roof. Time for long journeys and the inquisition of foreign kings to end where the star came to rest.

Time to remember those first visitors, such an unlikely group. They were witnesses to the focal point of history, and yet we hear about them just this once and never again. Those shepherds in the field—they were nameless and probably to a large extent, clueless, like a bunch of folks from a small town brought in off the street at the last minute to be extras in a movie they will never understand. What happened to those shepherds anyway? Ever wonder if any of them were still around when the movie came out thirty years later?

And the magi—those eastern kings. Mystical. Brooding. Psychic. They were pouring over celestial maps and ancient charts of the heavens, and someone saw it. Someone else confirmed it. Some unexplainable alignment of the stars. Perhaps they had somehow procured the Torah to confirm these signs, but that is unlikely. More probable that God allowed their own holy books to contain it. After all, they were invited guests, and the invitation had to go out. He probably would have left it lying around in one or more of the books they commonly read. I have a feeling we would be surprised and perhaps more than just a little uneasy about who would turn out to be today’s counterpart to the magi and about what they would be looking into today in order to see any new metaphysical signs in the universe.

But harder to understand than these unlikely guests who attended this event was the absence of all those who should have been there and weren’t—those who had the prophecies and the predictions and the Scriptures that told all about it from the one true God. These were those who studied their scriptures daily, who deciphered every word down to the dotting of the “i” and the crossing of the “t”. How did they miss it? Were they looking somewhere else? Did they miss the forest for the trees? Or did they see it and deny it because it meant too much of a threat to their order and control? They got the invitation, too, a long time ago, and when it came right down to it, perhaps they had other, more important things to do. All we know is this: the silence from this little corner of the universe at such a moment in history, was deafening.

Ever wonder if any of these same quandaries are at work today? Are people who aren’t even looking ever surprised by Christ? Do people who are looking, but in the wrong places, ever end up finding Jesus anyway? Do lights ever go on for folks who are simply standing out in a field tending their responsibilities, or do the searches of modern sages ever lead someone through the mazes of the supernatural to the real living Christ? I wouldn’t put anything past a God who chose this odd group of guests to attend Christ’s birth day, and gave them such a unique array of pathways to get there.