Fill… Spill… Thrill…

Lisa Kramme
Director of Faith Formation
Nebraska Synod, ELCA

It was Saturday, June 26, and we had loaded into five coach busses earlier that morning, bound for Minneapolis and the 2010 Nebraska Synod Youth Mission Trip. Our bus was scheduled to stop for lunch at a particular fast food restaurant in Sioux City, Iowa, and wisely, each of the five busses was assigned a different place to eat.

All 47 of us ordered quickly, as the restaurant staff members were doing their jobs well. Those in our group who finished eating early found themselves on a backyard-size lawn, behind the restaurant and next to their drive-through lane. Some youth started tossing around a football, and others of us launched into conversation, meeting new people with whom we’d be spending the week. It was a fun time. However, it appeared the manager of the restaurant was watching us.

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Lisa Kramme
Director of Faith Formation
Nebraska Synod, ELCA

This spring I trimmed back our rose bushes. They had been in decline and were quite scraggly. “What can it hurt?” I thought. Doing the same watering and fertilizing routine of the last few years had not done the trick, so pruning down to the bare minimum seemed to be what needed done next.

Then the rains came. And the sun shined. And, seemingly overnight, the rose bushes not only grew back from the pruning, but they are much more green and full than they have ever been since I started caring for them.

Life can be like these rose bushes. Sometimes we do the same things over and over, believing that we are caring for our responsibilities as we should. After awhile though, what used to work “before” does not work “now.” We ask questions about what could be wrong, but the answers we come up with do not help. We are stuck.

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Lisa Kramme
Director of Faith Formation
Nebraska Synod, ELCA

This past week I heard a historian talk about various stages of economic development our world has gone through.

In the beginning we were hunters and gatherers. Then we became largely agrarian, working with our hands and other small tools. After that came larger tools and the age of manufacturing. Now, we are in an era where the economy is based largely on information or knowledge.

The speaker asserted that a large shift has happened in “work” as our country defines that term. That is, we no longer work with our hands so much as we work with our minds. Although this seems to be true enough economically, I believe that some of the most important work we can engage in is still with our hands.

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