CHRISTMAS EVE, 2010!

KELSO, WA, 45 DEGREES, CLOUDY, NO RAIN.

We finished another week of tests and procedures by noon on Thursday, the 23rd of December. We drove down to Kelso, WA to spend Christmas with our daughters, Hanna, Cleo, and Ella and their families, along with my sister Kathy and her friend Marilyn from Iowa. I am still having some side effects from the new medications, but they aren't as severe as they were earlier in the week. My body must be assimilating them better. Brother Tom came over to Seattle for a couple of days and we had a good time with him. I will be preaching at the Christmas Eve Service here at Hanna's church at 7 pm this evening. It will give her a little break, as she has to preach again on Sunday and does so much in her congregation. We will have to return to Seattle Sunday afternoon and fast from 8 pm on for a PET/CT scan early Monday morning. Next week will be full of more tests, clinical research data accumulation, infusions, multiple blood tests and a clinical consultation with my entire medical team on Wednesday. We are cleared to have a 4 day pass, something like the military, so we are now planning to return to Walla Walla December, 30th. I will probably preach at CPPC on January 2nd and return to Seattle that afternoon. It will definitely be the last opportunity I will have to be in the pulpit for some time. We need to attend to a couple of little things on the Farm and at the church that we didn't have time to do previously. It will be good to share in the sacrament of the Lord's Supper one last time before the transplant. In fact, due to the delaly of the Holidays, they have pushed back my actual Transplant date to 1/11/11. If that looks and sounds somewhat intriguing, it may mean nothing, or it may be symbolic of the promise of a medical and hopefully spiritual renaissance in my life. God doesn't do anything without some purpose, so I will accept the short delay with thanksgiving and ask you to remark your prayer lists and calendars for Jan. 11th for the transplant. Our son, Amos, will be arriving in Seattle on Wednesday, hopefully in time for our consultation with our medical team. He will come home with us and then leave for Colorado Springs after we return to Seattle.

Sheep and shepherds have a prominent place in all of Scripture. "The Lord is my Shepherd", defines God in a profound and practical manner. Domesticated sheep have "a will to die", to quote my mother-in-law, Anna Kwak. She and Kriss' father tried to manage a 300 ewe flock of sheep that literally pushed them to the brink of sanity and health. Sheep are totally dependent upon the care and constant vigilence of human shepherds. They are vulnerable to an amazing assortment of life threatening problems. Intestinal parasites, foot rot, gnats that bite them around the nose and mouth and infect them with horrible sores, birthing complications, attacks by dogs and other predators, being too hot or too cold, various infectious diseases as well as generic livestock maladies. You have to trim their feet several times a year; clip and shear their wool at least once a year, deworm them 3-4 times a year make sure their food is free of mold, fungus and contamination of any kind and literally live with them 24/7 during lambing season.

I came by my shepherding heritage starting with my paternal Grandfather, P.O. Peterson. He and a partner shipped into Dillon, Montana the first flock of commercial sheep in the early part of the 20th century and pioneered the sheep industry of Western North Dakota and Eastern Montana. There is a picture and an article about him in a museum in Dillon and I hope to see it some day. From the time I recognized a sheep from a shetland pony, I was surrounded by sheep and the shepherd life style. As we moved from life in town to our current Farm, we expanded our children's 4-H projects into a 100 ewe operation. We might have 200 lambs a year from those 100 ewes and without "free" labor from our 4 children, it would have been impossible to manage. We developped our own niche market for finished lamb. Patit Creek in Dayton, WA bought leg of lamb and lamb chops, monthly. The Homestead Restaurant in Walla Walla wanted all the lamb chops we could supply. The Odd Fellows Home in Walla Walla took all our shoulder roasts and stew meat. It was fairly do-able as long as we could process them at Hill Meats in Pendleton, OR. When they closed their processing facility, we had to take them to the University of Idaho in Moscow, ID to be processed and federally inspected and stamped. Shortly after that, our children began to graduate from High School and leave home. When they left, so did the sheep.

I learned so many amazing spiritual lessons about God and life working as a real shepherd, that I consider it one of the most significant parts of my pastoral training. Like God, shepherds hold the keys to life and death for their flock. Scripture bemoans the fate of the flocks under the care of negligent shepherds. It is a constant theme of the Old Testament Prophets. The sheep are scattered, the young are lost, the herd dwindles, disease and parasites torment them all and the land is impoverished. Under proper management, sheep are one of the best natural components to a balanced and healthy environment. They can help restore marginal and unproductive land to something of beauty and utility. If you have hilly ground, the tendency is for nutrients in the soil to slowly erode from the top of the hills to the valleys and dales below. Sheep will actually begin to reverse that process. They will, of course, graze on the lush grasses in the valleys and low ground. But, they love to ruminate and therefore deposit fertilizer on the tops of hills so they can see predators that may be approaching. They redistribute the nutrients from the botton lands to the hilltops and the entire eco-system is rebalanced. Lambing season is a time like no other. If shepherds are not totally vigilent, you can lose up to 50% of your lamb crop. You have to accept the reality that you will lose a certain % no matter how conscientious you are, but without constant attention, the pile of dead lambs around the barn shouts at your incompetence and inattention.

Ewes do something immediately after birthing that they never do at any other time in their lives. As they clean their newborns, they literally "sing" with joy over their offspring. It is a sound like no other I have ever heard. It is such a moving and mystical experience that you can't take yourself away. It is repeated in Scripture when the people of God would ask the Almighty: "Sing over me!" Celebrate our birth and rebirth as your children. Bond with us at our deepest need and never forget our scent. Hound of Heaven, never stop following your wandering lambs and carry us safely home. The power of that experience came home in a powerful way for another Pastor, Roger Robbenholt, in a gathering at which I had been invited to speak. I told them about the "song" of the ewes and he came up to me following the gathering and told me this story. He had been brought up in Minnesota on a farm that included sheep. His father was an angry and abusive man that brutilized the entire family physically and emotionally. Except, one season of the year, the beatings would annually cease and no one could figure out what caused the welcomed respite. They always hoped and dreamed it would last forever, but it never did. During my presentation about the singing of the ewes, he suddenly realized that his father's temporary transformation correlated precisely with the onset of lambing season. Something powerful and inspirational touched this brutal and broken man that made him human again. Somehow he knew that this song celebrating birth and life had the power to transform the heart.

It was no coincidence that it was to "poor shepherds, keeping watch over their flocks by night", that the Heralds appeared, praising God and singing songs of adoration and thanksgiving. They couldn't resist the announcement, or the music. and hurried to see if what they had been told was true or not. They came to Bethlehem and found Joseph and Mary and the newborn baby Jesus in a barn; the baby lying in a manger, a feed bunk. The miracle of birth, both physical and spiritual is the essence of Christmas. God making the ultimate sacrifice of coming to Earth to be the perfect "Good Shepherd" is what makes this season so important. There are many times in our lives when we ache to hear God singing over us; times of danger, times of despair, times of lonliness, times of indecision. I pray for all of us that we will find the time and the way to be still and hear God singing over us; a song of love, a song of hope, a song of promise, a song of peace. I know that on the 11th of January, when my daughter's stem cells begin to flow into my veins and heart and throughout my body, I will listen as hard as I can and I will hear God singing over me a song of life.