Shelley D

Christ follower, married, retired teacher, owns far more than she needs

[Shelley D @SMDuPont]

@Halia0__ 3

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@Dentale16u 3

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@sofia_588 93

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@yslcamila Oops! I meant 63+64=127

[Shelley D @SMDuPont]

@yslcamila 64

[Shahriq Khan @RealShahriqKhan]

When I was Muslim, I thought Christians could never answer this.

I would challenge them on this technicality.

Bro, I thought I was so slick for this, but then I studied it. For years when I was Muslim, I never asked who actually built the golden calf.

I just knew it was a sin in the desert.

Then I read both accounts and one detail stopped me cold.

In the Bible, the man who builds the golden calf is AARON.

Aaron is Moses’ own brother. The first high priest (Exodus 32:4)

He gathers the gold, melts it, shapes the idol. And when Moses confronts him, he gives the weakest excuse in scripture: “I threw the gold in the fire and out came this calf.”

As if it made itself.

Bro.

The Bible just put the worst sin in the camp in the hands of the holiest man in the camp. You would NEVER write that if you were protecting your prophets.

Now read the Quran. Surah 20. Aaron is cleared and totally innocent. In fact, he tried to stop it. The blame goes to a mystery man called “al-Samiri.” That literally translates to “The Samaritan.” (Surah 20:85)

But this is what stopped me cold.

The Bible incriminates its own high priest.

The Quran writes him an alibi and invents a villain.

The Bible reads like an honest record.

The Quran reads like damage control.

And there’s a second problem with that villain. “The Samaritan.”

But Samaritans didn’t exist in Moses’ time.

The city of Samaria wasn’t founded until about 500 years later, under King Omri. 1 Kings 16:24.

It’s like putting a Texan at the Last Supper.

Now, some Muslim scholars push back, saying that “Samiri” means something else.

I’ll be fair, that argument exists. But their own classical commentators read it as “the Samaritan” for centuries. The defense only works by re-translating away from how the tradition always understood it.

I used to say the Bible was corrupted. But the Bible is honest enough to say the high priest built the idol.

That’s not the fingerprint of a cover-up. That’s the fingerprint of the truth!

Only a book honest about how bad we are could point me to a Savior real enough to fix it.

The Bible never flattered Aaron at all. It didn’t flatter me either.

It just told me the truth, and handed me Jesus.

[Samurai Shiba @SamuraiShibaJP]

My brother-in-law Shun is 36. An engineer. The quietest man in our family.

For nine years, he has taken the same train in Tokyo for 70 minutes every morning. In nine years, not one stranger has spoken to him.

Last month, his company sent him to a factory in a small town in Ohio. One week. His first time outside Japan.

His boss gave him a notebook and one instruction:

"Write down everything strange. So you don't make mistakes."

On his second day, Shun filled eleven pages.

He showed me the notebook. Here is one ordinary Tuesday in America, exactly as he wrote it.

6:51 a.m.
Hotel breakfast. A man I have never seen said "Mornin'." Not "Good morning." Just "Mornin'." Like we have known each other for twenty years and he is a little tired of me.

7:04 a.m.
I could not operate the waffle machine. An old man said "Here, buddy," and flipped it. He did not ask if I needed help. Then he told me about his knee surgery. His name is Gary. I now know more about Gary's knee than my father's.

7:48 a.m.
Two cars reached a four-way stop at the same time. Both drivers waved. Nobody moved. Eleven seconds. Then both went. Then both stopped. Then both waved again. A small war of kindness. Nobody won. I believe this is the national sport.

8:10 a.m.
On a country road, every pickup truck lifted one finger off the steering wheel at me. I did not know what it meant. I lifted one finger back. My heart was pounding. I have never felt so American.

9:15 a.m.
A coworker walked past and said, "How are you?" I prepared a full answer. He was already gone. I told the hallway I was fine.

11:52 a.m.
Drive-thru. The cashier said, "The car ahead of you got it." I tried to follow the car to say thank you. My coworker grabbed my arm. "Nah, man. You just get the next guy." So I paid for the car behind me. My hands were shaking. It is the most dangerous thing I have ever done.

12:40 p.m.
Diner. In one meal, the waitress called me "hon," then "sweetie," then "baby." I have been married six years. My wife has never called me baby. Brenda did it in forty minutes. Brenda also refilled my coffee four times without asking. I think Brenda loves me.

1:30 p.m.
Grocery store. A very tiny old woman pointed at the top shelf. "Can you grab that for me, sweetheart?" In Japan, we do not ask strangers. We wait for the shelf to come down. I grabbed it. She patted my arm and said, "You're a doll." I looked it up tonight. I am keeping it forever.

3:12 p.m.
A school bus stopped. A little red sign came out. Every car stopped. Both directions. Even the big truck on the other side of the road. Nobody told them to. Nobody had to.

3:40 p.m.
A girl, maybe seven, selling lemonade on the corner. Fifty cents. A man in a suit paid with a twenty and said, "Keep it, boss." She did not understand the math. She understood him.

5:55 p.m.
A man mowing his lawn went about two feet into his neighbor's yard, then turned around. I asked if it was a mistake. My coworker said, "Nah. You go a little over. That's how you say hi."

7:20 p.m.
Little league game. A man in the stands gave me half his sunflower seeds and explained baseball to me for two innings. I did not tell him I have watched baseball my entire life. I did not want him to stop.

A boy struck out. The whole crowd clapped anyway. The man next to me stood up and yelled, "That's okay, buddy! Good swing!"

Then he sat down and said, very quietly, "That's my boy."

In Japan, we clap when you hit the ball. Here, they clap because you swung.

9:48 p.m.
Back at the hotel. The woman at the front desk looked at me and said, "Long day?" I said yes. She said, "Well. You made it, hon."

I do not know why I cried in the elevator.

Wednesday morning, Shun asked his coworker Dale how his evening was.

Dale shrugged.

"Eh. Nothing happened."

Shun wrote that down too. Last line on page eleven. Underlined twice.

Next to it, in Japanese, he wrote: "That's a lie."

Shun has been back in Tokyo for three weeks now.

Every morning, on the same train, he says "Mornin'" to the man who sits across from him.

The man has not answered yet.

Shun says that's okay.

"In America, you go a little over."

America, every night you go to bed and say nothing happened.

Something happened.

Forty times. Before dinner. In one small town.

You waved the finger. You paid for the stranger. You stopped for the bus. You clapped for the boy who missed.

You don't remember a single one.

A quiet man in Tokyo remembers all of them.

You haven't lost a thing, America.

You just stopped writing it down.

So we did.

[Samurai Shiba @SamuraiShibaJP]

My cousin Haruka hasn't been afraid of anything since she was seventeen.

She says it's because a roofer from Oklahoma once lay on top of her while the sky fell.

Fifteen years ago, Haruka spent a year as an exchange student in a small town in Oklahoma. She was shy. She had never been away from home. She cried the first night and didn't tell anyone.

Her host dad was Curtis. 44. A roofer. Big, loud, sunburned, and completely sure he was good at Japanese.

He said "Konnichiwa" to her every time he saw her. Morning. Noon. Eleven at night. She never had the heart to tell him.

He grilled everything. Burgers. Corn. A pineapple. Once, she swears, a cake. Curtis believed in fire.

He built her a shelf in the kitchen for her Japanese snacks and put a label on it in black marker:

"HARUKA'S WEIRD FOOD. DO NOT TOUCH. (BOYS.)"

The boys were his sons. Eight and eleven. They touched it constantly.

His wife, Donna, braided Haruka's hair before school and called her "sugar." By Christmas, Haruka had stopped crying at night.

Then came May.

At 4:12 in the afternoon, the sirens started. The sky turned green. Haruka had never seen a green sky. She thought it was beautiful. Donna grabbed her arm and said, very calmly, "Baby, we need to go inside now."

Curtis came home from a job through the hail. He didn't park. He just left the truck in the yard with the door open.

He put all of them in the bathroom. Donna and the boys and Haruka, in the bathtub. He pulled a mattress over the top of them.

Then Curtis lay down on top of the mattress.

On top of all four of them.

Haruka says it sounded like a freight train driving through the house. She felt the walls go. She felt the air get pulled out of her chest. She felt Curtis's whole weight pressing down on them, and she felt him not move. Not once.

It lasted about thirty seconds. She says it was the longest year of her life.

Then it was quiet.

When she opened her eyes, she could see the sky.

No roof. No walls. The house was gone. The only thing left standing was the bathtub they were lying in.

Curtis's back was bleeding through his shirt. Glass. Wood. He didn't look at it.

The first thing he said was:

"Everybody say your name."

Donna said hers. The boys said theirs. Haruka said hers last, in a whisper.

"Good," Curtis said. "Everybody's here."

Then he climbed out of the bathtub and walked next door to dig out Mrs. Pruett, who was 79, from under her kitchen ceiling. He didn't mention his back until she was safe.

Sixty stitches.

The next morning, before the sun came up, Haruka heard chainsaws.

Strangers. Dozens of them. Trucks with Texas plates, Arkansas plates, Kansas plates. Nobody had called them. A church fed 400 people out of a parking lot. A man she had never seen handed her a pair of work gloves and said, "Welcome to Oklahoma, darlin'."

Curtis was out there at dawn with sixty stitches in his back, cutting up the neighbor's fallen tree first.

When someone asked about his own house, he said, "Ours ain't going anywhere."

Haruka's parents called from Japan, crying. Come home. Please come home.

She said no.

She stayed until the end of the school year and helped rebuild a town that wasn't hers. She carried boards. She swept glass. She learned to use a nail gun. Curtis watched her one afternoon, shook his head, and said, "You're a whole lot tougher than you look, kid."

She told me that sentence changed her life.

Haruka is 32 now. She works in disaster relief in Japan.

Two years ago, after a big earthquake on the Japan Sea coast, she was sleeping in a school gym with forty families who had lost their homes. In the middle of the night, a huge aftershock hit. The lights went out. The children started screaming.

Haruka pulled the kids under a table, lay down on top of them, and said, in Japanese:

"Everybody, say your name."

One by one, they did.

"Good," she said. "Everybody's here."

Curtis is 59 now. He still has the scar. He calls it "the map of Oklahoma." Every May, Haruka sends him a photo of herself in a hard hat. He sends back the same thing every year. A picture of a pineapple on a grill.

I asked her once how she can be so brave.

"I'm not brave," she said. "I'm afraid of everything."

"But I know what a brave man feels like. He feels heavy. He feels warm. And if the sky falls, it has to go through him first."

[Reads with Ravi @readswithravi]

This paragraph by Richard Feynman hits so hard:

“Fall in love with some activity, and do it! Nobody ever figures out what life is all about, and it doesn’t matter. Explore the world. Nearly everything is really interesting if you go into it deeply enough. Work as hard and as much as you want to on the things you like to do the best. Don’t think about what you want to be, but what you want to do. Keep up some kind of a minimum with other things so that society doesn’t stop you from doing anything at all.”

[Samurai Shiba @SamuraiShibaJP]

My wife has taught high school in Tokyo for twenty years.

Every year, a few of her students spend a year living with a family in America. When they come home, she asks each of them one question.

"What do you miss?"

She expects hamburgers.

She almost never gets hamburgers.

And these aren't old stories. Most of these kids came home in the last two years.

"Every time I left the house, my host mom said, 'Text me when you get there.' In Japan, nobody needs to know where I am. In Ohio, somebody always did." (Mina, 17, Ohio)

"If you walk toward a door, an American will hold it open. Even if you are very far away. So you have to run. I ran to so many doors." (Itsuki, 16, Georgia)

"My host brother screamed on the floor of a grocery store. A stranger walked by and said to my host mom, 'You're doing great, Mama.' She almost cried. I didn't know strangers were allowed to say that." (Aoi, 17, Texas)

"We went away for the weekend and left our trash can at the curb. When we got back, it was by the garage. Nobody said who. My host dad said if it had been there one more day, the neighbor would have knocked." (Haruto, 16, Minnesota)

"A car got stuck in the snow in front of our house. Four men came out of four houses. Nobody called them. They pushed, the car drove away, and they went back inside without saying their names." (Ren, 17, Michigan)

"Every American has jumper cables. Maybe half of them know which clip goes where. The other half help anyway." (Shin, 16, Montana)

"In July, my host family put a cooler on the porch. Cold water, snacks, and a sign: 'For our delivery drivers. Thank you!' I asked if they knew the drivers. They said no." (Nanami, 16, Arizona)

"Downtown, there are banners on the lampposts. Photos of soldiers from the town. Some old, some very young. My host grandpa walked me down the street and told me every name." (Yuna, 16, Iowa)

"I got a C-plus on my first test. My host dad said, 'I'm proud of you,' and put it on the fridge. In Japan, nobody is proud of a C-plus." (Takeru, 17, Pennsylvania)

Then the quietest girl in the class raised her hand.

Sora. Seventeen. Missouri.

"Nobody asks me 'home safe?' anymore," she said.

She was wrong.

In September, there was a typhoon warning for Tokyo. At 2 a.m., Sora's phone lit up.

It was her host mom. In Missouri. Watching the weather in a country she had never been to.

"Saw the storm. You home safe?"

Sora told my wife she cried for a long time. Then she typed the answer she had typed a hundred times, from football games and friends' driveways.

"Home safe."

Her host mom wrote back one line.

"Good. That's all I needed."

My wife has asked that question for twenty years. Not one kid has ever said they missed how big America is.

They miss how America says goodbye. And how it checks that you got home.

So, America. You think you've lost something.

You haven't. It's on a porch in Arizona. It's pushing a car in Michigan. It's awake at 2 a.m. in Missouri, watching our weather.

You don't remember doing any of it.

A kid in Tokyo will never forget.

[Shelley D @SMDuPont]

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[Shahriq Khan @RealShahriqKhan]

I served Allah in fear. I serve Jesus in joy.

Galatians 5:13: “You, my brothers and sisters, were called to be free. But do not use your freedom to indulge the flesh; rather, serve one another humbly in love.”

[Shelley D @SMDuPont]

@gizmexe 33