Triple C News - May 29, 2021
Hey, everyone!
Well, before we go any further…
here’s your weekend weather forecast…
“Sunday will be MOSTLY SUNNY WITH HIGHS IN THE MID 70S!!!!”
(emphasis added)
Isn’t that AWESOME!?!?
Our last Sunday in the park before we return to our home base at 100 Ogden will be beautiful!!!
We only have…
“One day more!
Another day, another destiny!
This never-ending road to immunity…
The first shot didn’t cost a dime
It’ll surely come a second time…
One day more!…
Tomorrow we'll discover
What our God in Heaven has in store!
One more dawn!
One more day!
One daaayyy moooooooore!!!!”
(Sorry, Les Mis!)
Y’know, as we joyously come out of the months of hunkering down, masking up and spreading out, it might take a little minute to get used to “the way we were.”
Some are still struggling to recover their sense of smell that they lost when they got the coronavirus. For reasons not fully understood, “anosmia” (not being able to smell) occurred in 80%! For most it came back fully but about 5% still can’t quite smell well!
Researchers are using a technique of strong essential oils of various scents and pictures associated with each particular smell to rebuilt neurological brain pathways to the memory!
Because smells are the quickest and strongest ways to return to the days of your past.
You know the feeling of smelling something you didn’t expect to and immediately you’re transported to some moment of years gone by, with the accompanying emotional flood??
It’s actually because in your brain…
“...the olfactory bulb has intimate access to the amygdala, which processes emotion, and the hippocampus, which is responsible for associative learning…”
(I didn’t know I had a hippocampus in my brain! Sounds like something smart and heavy!)
One day a while back, I rode a smell to a “long time ago in a galaxy far, far away”.
I was jogging down the country road in front of my house.
It was still dark. You couldn’t see much but you knew the cows and skunks were out there!
The smells were totally Oliver Spring-y!
Suddenly…
I was in a slummy, broken down old dormitory on a foggy night in the outskirts of Milan, Italy.
I was in a room with a bunch of Arabic guys from Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon, watching them grow in their new faith in Jesus.
One of the most sincere and humble people I’ve ever known was there.
Antoine Stefan grew in war-torn Lebanon and had come to Milan to study.
He accepted Jesus, eventually finished his masters in engineering, and together we started an Arabic language church in the city.
He went from being a learner and beginner with a lot of problems to one of my dearest and closest friends and brothers.
In the beginning, my colleagues and I just kinda felt sorry for those lonely guys. We wanted to help them because they had so little and were so far from home. They became kind of a “mission of mercy” for us.
Once (before cell phones), we gave Antoine a coffee can full of change for his birthday so he could call home to Beriut on the pay phone.
You NEVER give money to someone from Lebanon as a gift in front of his friends!
It’s totally socially unacceptable!
But, hey! we didn’t know!
And we felt so sorry for him!
But in a couple of years, Antoine was truly a precious, faithful brother and friend.
Besides Tina, he was about my best friend over there.
He lives outside of Milan with his wife and three kids and after a life-threatening illness doing this difficult year, praise God, today he's recovering well.
And I had a moment early on an Oliver Springs morning, when I really missed him.
Then I thought of an amazing verse I had read that morning.
In the Gospel of John 15:9, Jesus said something astounding.
“As the Father has loved Me, so have I loved you…”
Jesus loves me like the Father loves Him!
I am daily deeeeeeply thankful that Jesus has pity on me!
He loves me with an infinite mercy for a helpless weakling!
Of His compassion, pity, mercy, I sing, ”I Need These Ev’ry Hour!”
But He has more!
The Father loves the Son just because He is Who He is!
We would never associate pity or mercy with the love the Father had for Jesus.
He just loved Jesus!
For being Jesus!
And Jesus loves me like that!
With pity? Yes!
With mercy for the weak and helpless? Hallelujah!
But also…
He just loves me!
Because…
I’m me!
At first, I cared about Antoine with a kind of sympathy.
(Or somethin’ like it.)
But after a while...
After a while, I just had a huge place in my heart for Antoine Stefan, because he was…
Antoine!
The Father loves the Son because…
He’s Jesus!
And Jesus loves me because…
among other things…
I’m me!
You’re you!
Yea!!
“Wow!! Where did all that come from on a country road in pre-dawn Oliver Springs?”, I wondered.
Then I knew.
An Oliver Springs school bus had just passed me…
I’m smelling diesel fumes…
Smelling diesel in my hippocampus…
all the hippos are smelling it…
In an instant…
in my memories…
I’m on the bus…
a diesel bus……
in Milano…
talkin’ and laughin’ with my homeboy, Antoine!
John 15.9…”Come il Padre ha amato me, cosí io ho amato voi…”
I love that diesel smell!