The Bungee Cord 3-13-23

Hello,

For the first four days of last week, I couldn’t hear out of my right ear….not a thing. I thought that I might have caught a cold and it settled in my Eustachian tubes. There was this clogged up feeling that seemed like a hairball in a kitchen sink. When people talked to me, I had to turn my head to my right so that my good ear might catch their words, and when I was in the gym (which is hard to hear in with two good ears) playing pickleball, all I could pick up was echoes over lapping echoes. I tried battling it with decongestants and antihistamines, but neither made a dent in my deafness at all. So, after four days of saying, “I’m sorry, I didn’t hear you,” I decided to go see my doctor.

The doctor asked me a bunch of doctor questions, and then he pulled out the flashlight thing with a small funnel on the end and said, “Let’s take a look.” Within seconds of sticking it in my ear, he said, “I see the problem. You have a wall of wax covering your eardrum. I’ll have the nurse clean it out for you and that should solve the problem.”

He left and the nurse came in holding a plastic jar about a pint in size that had a small hose with a nozzle on the end of it. She covered my shoulder with a towel and put a contoured small tub under my ear and said, “Now you hold this.” She then stuck the nozzle in my ear and started squeezing a handle on the jar which squirted water in my ear. I could feel the water blasting away at the wall of wax, and then all of the sudden as if someone had turned the volume switch on, I could hear again! Instantaneous. Although I wouldn’t call it miraculous, I got a sense of what those who were deaf that had their hearing restored by Jesus experienced. When one can’t hear, and then suddenly does, one realizes the blessing of being able to hear.

It's a blessing to hear and experience orientation in life. It’s a blessing to hear the sounds of the world around. It’s a blessing to hear with clarity someone say to you, “I love you.” It is a blessing to hear the footsteps on the floor to tell you that you are not alone.

After last week, I have a new appreciation for the Christian season of Lent. Like earwax, the globbiness of the world can collect and settle in our ears. Sorrow and grief cling. Pressures and failures settle with the strength of glue. Sin, that we produce or that finds its way into our life, forms clogs that muffle. Pretty soon we start having a hard time hearing, hearing the loving care of God for us, and we find ourselves saying, “God, are you here? I don’t hear you. God, do you love me? I can’t hear you over the noise of the world that is telling me that I am unlovable.”

I now have come to see these 40 days of Lent as spiritual ear cleaning. During these days when we pray, fast, do a specific deed of love and mercy, attend mid-week services, and sing “boring” hymns we are turning our faces to the Lord, and the Lord comes to us with powerful waters of grace, blasting away at the globby wax that we accumulate in our ears. So that when Easter comes, we can hear the good news that God has for us that changes our lives.

“I love you! I died and rose for you! I am here with you, and there is nothing in all of creation that can separate me from you! The world may call you a lot of things, but I whose hands created the universe have only one name for you, and that name is “beloved child.”

It is a wondrous and miraculous thing to hear, and during these wintery days of Lent, God is squirting with divine pressure grace-full water into your ears so that when Easter comes you will clearly hear God’s word to you and live!

Have a great week.

God’s grace and peace, (ggap)

Pastor Jerry Nuernberger

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