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This is an excerpt from the family history book I’m working on.  The first part was posted on Friday.

The kitchen table – these were the hubs to the wheel of life.  Breakfast together around the table, then out for chores or school or work, then back to the table for lunch, then out again, then back to the table for supper: tired eating at the end of a long day.  The kitchen lantern hissed late into the night over those tables.

And there Samuel lay.  He would have been feverish by then, perhaps clutching his gut in pain.  He may have required help to walk to the table, assistance to rise up on it and then lie down.  The doctor fumbled nervously through his bag as Samuel was given something to drink, something to numb the pain, and something to bite down on.

The eyes of the children peeking through the windows would have widened as Samuel Lapp’s shirt was pulled back.

“Come away!” their parents yelled from across the yard.  “Get away from there!”

And they scattered, relieved to be torn from that sight.

The doctor that no longer has a name pulled the small scalpel from his bag, hands shaking.  Perhaps Samuel felt the cold steel slide into his skin, or perhaps the pain he had been in for days was already clouding his mind.

His blood ran out on the sheets covering the family table as the drunk doctor pulled him apart.  But he would not survive.  Removed, along with the offending organ, was his life, and it fluttered around the room for a moment, then vanished into the cold December air.

My great-great grandmother, in her early 20s, sat in the back room with her three children: Anna, Benjamin and John.  A widow.  Her family gathered around her, hugging her, wiping her tears.  The children sat there, probably wondering what kind of a doctor brought this into the house.

I wonder how that doctor felt on the train back to Philadelphia.  Relieved perhaps, that it was over?  Stone drunk?  Would he remember the surgery in the morning?  Would his life be racked with guilt because of the Amish man with appendicitis that he killed on that December day?

If I were a ghost, I would hover over him in that train and shout.  I would tell him not to feel bad – his slight of hand, his willingness to try, may have killed Samuel Lapp.  But on that day, December 10, 1898, that doctor saved my life.  And the life of my mother’s family.  The life of my son.

Because Catharine went on to marry my great-great grandfather, Amos King.  And they gave birth to my great-grandmother.  And so on.

One death leads to so many lives.

This is an excerpt from the family history book I am working on.  I hope you enjoy it.  Have a great weekend.

The doctor arrived at the Gordonville train station.  In 1898 there were four tracks slicing their way through the small town (population 413), and nearly 200 trains passed through every day.  I can imagine the Amish relatives of my great-great grandmother (Catharine Lapp at the time – she was also Amish, as were all my descendants in the late 1800s) waiting by the tracks, perhaps still sitting in their buggy.  This doctor was their last hope.

The intriguing part about history is that we know what will happen.  We know who will live and who will die.  And in his own strange way, this doctor saved my life that day.

I can only imagine what the doctor was feeling on his way to the house.  Had he done many appendix operations before?  Doctors had only recently begun treating appendicitis by removing the appendix, as opposed to draining it as they had for centuries.  Opening a body up, removing organs, cleaning the infection, sterilizing and suturing the internal areas, knitting the flesh back together, stopping the bleeding – the skills that allowed these things  to happen were still in their infancy.

In the late 1800s appendectomies were rarely successful.

Apparently our kind doctor was nervous – he arrived intoxicated, wreaking of the alcohol he had been drinking all the way from Philadelphia.  In those days the patient needed alcohol to dull the pain.  The doctor sometimes used it to calm his nerves as an antidote against the violent, bloody scene an operation like that could become.  He was driven to my great-great grandmother’s house on a cold December day in 1898.  He got down from the buggy and carried his bag into the house.  The horses’ mouths threw steam up into the air, their hides smoking with heat.

The doctor was ushered inside.  The panes of glass were coated with a frosty glaze from the cold, but that didn’t stop the neighbor kids from huddling around outside, wiping away the frost with their cold fingers, watching as the doctor asked the family to lay Samuel Lapp on the large kitchen table.

(to be continued on Monday)

Whew.  Too many serious posts this week.  It’s making my head spin.  Or implode.

Anyway, check out these three links for funny stuff that will clear the cobwebs:

1 – Bryan Allain’s super hilarious “The Truth About…” videos: Start with the truth about bears and work your way through all of them.

2 – Tyler Stanton’s videos…any of them: just click HERE and start laughing (you can even laugh before the video starts – no matter how hard you fake laugh, your real laugh will be even harder when the video starts playing)

3 – Go to Tripp Crosby’s blog, scroll down to Organ Hero, and laugh. For a blog that’s dead, it’s pretty funny.

This isn’t exactly new stuff – it’s been around for a couple of months, but just in case you’re not on to these guys, and you need a laugh after three days of intense posts, there you go.

Don’t forget to check out the Fireside Writer’s Conference information. Only three months to go – stay tuned for a few more announcements about newly acquired speaker-folks in the next week or two, as well as a few opportunities to win some great prizes for spreading the word and/or signing up to attend.

Anyone out there read “Lone Survivor”? It’s a book about 4 Navy SEALs that get dropped into Afghanistan to take out a Taliban leader.  At one point they cross paths with some shepherds and have to decide if they’re going to kill them in cold blood, or let them go and take a huge risk.  They let them go.  The shepherds go back and tell their Taliban buddies, and all hell breaks loose.

Three of the SEALs die in the ensuing firefight. One gets taken in by a villager and lives to tell the tale.  But here’s the part of the story that’s been sticking in my head this week:

At the end of it all, the armed forces send SEALs back in to recover the bodies of their fallen comrades. Even though the fight took place over a 7-mile stretch of mountains, they search until they find them, and they bring them home.  They couldn’t take the risk of deserting a living soldier, but even if they knew they were dead, they’d still go back.

This made me reflect on life: what do we do to people who make mistakes in life that lead to emotional or relational injury? What do we do to our friends or fellow human beings that screw up? Are we determined to go out there and find them and bring them home, dead or alive?  Do we treat them with grace?  Or do we say things like:

“It’s their life.”

“Sometimes you have to pay for the decisions you make.”

“You reap what you sow.”

Or even worse, do we look through the scope of our sniper rifle from our position of safety, pick them out where they’ve fallen in enemy territory, and shoot them in the head ourselves with slander and gossip?

I can think of some people that I helped rescue from behind enemy lines, and it was awesome.  I can also think of some folks I left for dead – it’s a shameful feeling.

Brett Harrison referred to this idea on his blog a week or so ago (I think), but I couldn’t find the post.  Check out his blog HERE.

First of all,  thanks to everyone who read and commented on yesterday’s post. I hope you enjoyed the conversation as much as I did.  Here are some follow up thoughts:

1) I thought everyone kept a respectful tone in their comments, which I appreciate. Because most of us have been greatly influenced by the modern era, we tend to feel that the things we believe are part of our identity.  The modern era placed such a huge emphasis on knowledge and being right, so we tend to take it personally when someone tells us we’re not right or when our long-standing beliefs are challenged.

2) We can all use more practice when it comes to disagreeing with each other in a peaceful way – hopefully yesterday provided that.

3) Words and their meanings change over time, usually subtly, sometimes drastically. I would challenge everyone not to become wed to a particular word in order to convey a concept because, especially these days, the perceived meanings of words are changing all the time, faster than ever.  None of the English words in the Bible are sacred in and of themselves – Jesus did not speak any of them specifically, word for word.  They are simply our best interpretation of what was said in the original language.  If we’re not keeping our finger on a word’s pulse of meaning, if we lose touch with how most people are defining a word, we could very well be conveying a message we don’t want or mean to convey.

4) Communicating a concept requires that the communicator maintain some sort of flexibility depending on the audience and situation.  Jill touched on this in the comments of yesterday’s post – in a foreign country, if you don’t speak the language, you’ve got to come up with creative ways of communicating.  Sometimes, based on our upbringing or background or socioeconomic status, we are speaking “different languages” from other folks, even if we both speak English.  If you are trying to communicate a complex set of ideas (like how to build a nuclear power plant, or what being a Christian means), be prepared to get creative in the language you employ.

What words do you think have lost meaning, or changed their meaning, in our lifetime?

In the interests of full disclosure, you should know that the first 8 comments were made when only the title was posted.  I also wrote this piece prior to those comments.  If you can keep that time line straight in your head, you’re probably also a good juggler or a successful executive administrator.

* * * * *

There are some words the church should stop using.  I have a whole list.

But when I say they should stop using a word, I don’t mean that the concept is dead or never existed or is incorrect; I just mean that the word no longer seems to fit, mostly due to the changing culture and how we now view that word (in English).

The first word I would like to annihilate is the word “sin”.  Dear church, please don’t use that word anymore.

On Friday I jumped on Twitter and asked the Twitterverse what their first thought was when I said the word “sin”:

@BrandonSneed said vuvuzela. Hard to argue with that.

@XCcampbell said “Muzac remakes of classic rock songs.” I have no idea what that is.

@LadyCrow said “Yum! Perfume.” This says more about how marketing departments have harnessed our natural inclination towards the “verboten” than it does the church’s use of the word, but still a fascinating response that probably deserves an entire post unto itself.

Here are some other responses I got: Separation;  Hurt;  Painful;  Offense; Crime; Violation.  And these all make sense, to a certain degree.  I was beginning to wonder if maybe folks did have a good handle on the meaning of sin.  Maybe it’s not lost it’s meaning. But then I got this response:

Damnation.

And a few others along those lines.  That last association came from a self-proclaimed “outsider” and this is what I suspected.  Sin has come to represent the list of things the church does not approve of, often a legalistic and man made list.  “Outsiders” hear the term and feel that it represents all that the church finds repulsive in them, as people, yet they know that people in the church are violating this list of “sins” all the time.

But sin is so much more than just the breaking of a man made rule.

“All have sinned and come short of the glory of God”  Romans 3:23

* * * * *

So what did the original word for sin in the Bible, amartia in Greek, mean? One of the Greek definitions is “missing the mark.”

All have missed the mark.

Kind of hard to argue with that. This morning when I got frustrated at my child for throwing their cereal on the floor and yelled at them, I probably missed the mark (I don’t think the emotion is the “missing of the mark” as much as how we respond to that emotion).  So if I got angry (not missing the mark) at someone for pulling out in front of me and I gave them the bird, I’ve missed the mark.

And even on the days I manage not to DO anything wrong, I’ve still had plenty of thoughts that have missed the mark.  All day, every day.

* * * * *

By eliminating the use of the word “sin”, I’m not trying to do away with the concept that we as humans screw up – in fact, it’s in our nature. I’m certainly not trying to downplay the seriousness of this “missing the mark,” how it can get our lives all knotted up and hurt us and the people around us. I just don’t think that “sin” is the best way to communicate the concept of “missing the mark” because most people outside the church think of an arbitrary list created by the church that basically forbids many things they consider fun.

Instead of using “sin”, why don’t we just talk about “missing the mark”?  Instead of saying “sin”, why don’t we talk about the specifics?  The word “sin” is like the word “postmodern”: it means too many different things to too many different people, and in the process has lost its true meaning.

Should the church keep using words if people no longer know what they really mean or understand them the way “insiders” do?

Are there other words you think the church should stop using?

Have I completely lost the plot?