Jumping Around

After preaching and the intensity of coffee hour, where I am very tired and concentrating hard on what people are saying to me because it's my one chance to connect with a lot of my folks, and it's a dear opportunity. I am wiped out but also jacked up from all that human energy whinging around me. I've been slugging around the house, not good for much. My new vice is Facebook, which is bad, bad, bad for someone with ADD. It's also an excellent procrastination tool. One plus: someone from my high school class "friended" me and I saw where she had posted this goofy YouTube clip of the Archies. Suddenly, it was Sixth Grade Slumber Party Time. It was the Archies playing their seminal works, "Sugar, Sugar" and "Shang-A-Lang". It was the Bay City Rollers playing"Saturday Night" and "I Only Want To Be With You". It was the Jacksons, Tommy James, the Partridge Family. I could remember dancing in my girlfriends' basements, squealing when my fave "Roller", Les, appeared on Merv Griffin. (Now he looks a bit stuck on himself, if you asked me.) But more than specific memories, I just felt excited all over again. No pretense of taste, here; none required. I was dancing like an idiot. Actually, I'm a good dancer. But I doubt the neighbors would have noted the quality as much as the simple fact of their 48-year-old neighbor jumping around in her bedroom. Hope I don't show up on YouTube.

I've often pooh-poohed nostalgia. Explore new things, I say. Engage your brain with new information. But this sure was fun. I recently heard someone on NPR recall the sensation of listening to the radio and hearing your favorite song, shouting, "It's on! It's on! They're playing it!" Or walking down the beach and hearing the same song on everyone's radio. That experience is gone. There were fewer choices, then. But maybe music was more exciting because more people shared it with you. It wasn't your special little ipod playlist plugged into your private ear. Or maybe I'm just tired.

where your treasure is

Matthew 6:19-21

.19."Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume and where thieves break in and steal, 6.20 but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust consumes and where thieves do not break in and steal. 6.21 For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.

This teaching has always had a pious ring to it, telling us to be good, to think more of "heaven" than having that lovely thing at ______ (name of store that makes you insane with desire). Certainly the plainest meaning seems to be that possessions and wealth are vulnerable to theft and decay. I've experienced it. Seeing delicate little holes in my favorite sweater after stuffing it in a cardboard box for the summer, or reduced to a doll sweater after my boyfriend put it in the washer by mistake; being obsessed to have a new Blackberry which will be obsolete in 5 months - I well understand. And yet I've found these experiences of emptiness and disappointment do quite little to quench the fever when it comes upon me. I confess that the notion of 'treasure', still sounds rather exciting. I picture running my hands through a pile of shimmering gold coins and cackling, "I'm rich, rich, rich!" I think of waltzing into Macy's and shooting the works on Any Thing I Damn Well Want. I think Jesus knew how alluring all this was to people, even in a culture that couldn't have been as consumer-crazed as ours. Maybe it made them curious about heaven, and what could possibly be more compelling about it than the stuff they lusted for. And so you have to ask, what is heaven? It's 11:00 pm and I have to go to bed. Maybe I'll dream the answer. Or maybe you'll tell me.