Dare to be a Dog

Dogs win accolades for unconditional love – and they should.

I want to praise dogs for their joyfulness.

Every day we take pretty much the same walk with our dog. Every day, other dog owners take pretty much the same walk with their dogs. Yet, every day, every dog is joyful to be out on a walk – even when passing the same scenery, the same greenery, the same same. Regardless of the sameness and circumstances surrounding them, the dogs are joyful to be alive and to be with the people they love. They exercise an attitude of gratitude.

What a life-changing spiritual lesson we could learn from dogs! Dare to be a dog! Dare to be joyful! People talk about being “stuck in a rut,” but wherever we are in life never starts out as a rut. It becomes a rut when we continuously dig it with complaining and a lack of gratitude. No matter where we live, God has created a beautiful world and has blessed us with another day of life. If you are reading this, you still have your life. With that life come the possibility and responsibility of choosing joy or sorrow; hopelessness or faith. Many other choices surround us in life, but depression destroys health. Joy restores health. “A merry heart does good, like medicine, but a broken spirit dries up the bones,” Proverbs 17:22.

Life doesn’t come with a rewind button. None of us can undo hurts and harms from the past. Our only choices are to become better and stronger from the heartbreaks we’ve survived– or bitter and resentful.

God loves an attitude of gratitude. He created us to praise Him. When Jesus was told that his worshiping followers were too loud and joyful, Jesus responded, “If they keep silent, the stones will cry out.”

Psalm 150 exhorts, “Let everything that has breath praise the LORD. Praise the LORD!”

Many people make many New Year’s Resolutions. One would suffice. Dare to be a dog.

http://www.amazon.com/Stephanie-Parker-McKean/e/B00BOX90OO/ref=ntt_dp_epwbk_0

Welcome Storms in 2014

When tornado-strength thunderstorm winds batter the Texas Hill Country, massive live oak trees that have stood for hundreds of years uproot and topple. Here in the Black Isle of Scotland, gale force winds sweep from coast to coast constantly – seldom uprooting or toppling trees.

Duress has provided the impetus compelling Scottish trees to grow into defiant survivors impervious to life’s storms. Scottish trees stand intransigent and victorious, feeding on the fury of the wind to send roots deeper into the soil.

That’s a good illustration for the New Year. Welcome life’s storms as challenges forcing growth and change. Storms may seem like furious, unrelenting events over which we have no power, and which will rob us of victory or success, but the power of life’s storms and our resulting defeat are both illusions.

The Bible promises that our weakness is an opportunity for God to present Himself strong and victorious in our lives. God told Paul, “My grace is sufficient for you: My strength is made perfect in weakness.”

The world has coined two clichés: what doesn’t make you bitter makes you better and what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.

Storms have peppered my life over the years. As a child, I lived in a cowshed with no indoor plumbing facilities. After escaping childhood sexual abuse and two forced non-medically supervised abortions that nearly killed me, I lived under a bridge. As a single parent, I worked two and three jobs to make ends meet and slept in the back of a pickup truck on top of our belongings when moving from job to job. I spent over a year in an open-ended garden center with no indoor plumbing, bathroom or kitchen facilities, and wildlife coming in and out freely. I had my property stolen by underhanded legal proceedings. All on the same day; our sheepdog died, my mother died and I couldn’t attend her funeral because my husband was sent home in an ambulance to die, and my truck caught on fire in downtown San Antonio. Just over a month ago, I lost my only son in a plane crash. No one is immune to storms. We have two choices when storms hit us; suffer and grow bitter, or grow and become stronger.

Storms have strengthened my writing, too. From the time I was eleven, all I’ve wanted to do is write. Fifty years of rejection slips, disappointments and closed doors have strengthened my resolve into a wall that simply can’t be battered down. I’m thankful to have six published mystery-romance-suspense books, but even if I had never had one book published or one copy sold – I would keep writing. Storms have driven my writing roots so deep that they can’t be uprooted.

May your 2014 be full of calm, peace, love and joy and as few storms as possible. Should a storm find you in 2014, embrace it as an opportunity to grow stronger roots. My prayer for you: “That God would grant you according to the riches of His glory, to be strengthened with might by His Spirit in your inner parts.” Ephesians 3:16.

When I feel faint, I look again at this picture of a little tree determinedly growing out of the top of a fence post. If it can bloom where God has planted it, so can I!

Link to all six of Stephanie Parker McKean’s Christian mystery-romance-suspense books: http://www.amazon.com/Stephanie-Parker-McKean/e/B00BOX90OO/ref=ntt_dp_epwbk_0

Sailcats, Crucifix Fish & the New Year

Kindhearted volunteer Marshall Scott answered the U.S. Marine Corps call to rescue me at the Charlotte, North Carolina, airport on Thanksgiving Day after I attended my son Luke Parker’s memorial service. Marshall took time away from his family Thanksgiving to make sure I made my connecting flight. Additionally he shared the legend of the Crucifix Fish.

Jesus on the cross is outlined on the front of the sailcat’s skeleton, complete with the hilt of the sword that was plunged into Jesus’ side. The back of the skeleton displays the Roman shield. When you shake the cross, you can hear the dice being tossed for the Lord’s clothing.

When I got back to Scotland, my research disclosed that gaftopsail catfish witness God’s love in life, too. For example: Jesus died on the cross and went down for hell for three days to take the keys of death and hell away from satan and secure eternal life for us. The sailcat lives on the soft bottom of the ocean – but unlike other catfish – it doesn’t feed there. Just as Jesus loves and accepts everyone of every color, every country, every social status in life, the sailcat feeds up and down through the entire water column.

Male gaftopsail catfish brood their young in their mouths until they hatch. During this entire period of up to 65 days, males do not eat. What a great parallel of Jesus’ nature; His willingness to sacrifice even His life that we might be born again and grow into His image. Jesus never leaves us nor forsakes us when we are weak.

Sailcats are saltwater catfish. As Christians, we are instructed to be salt in the world. We should walk in love, but also in truth. Our truth – salt – has great healing power.

Crucifix Fish skeletons are popular for jewelry, but rare. Imagine my delight when I received a Christmas present from the Scott family, a box containing a Crucifix Fish! It will be freely shared here, going so much further than just our house.

What a great New Year it would be if we all took lessons from Crucifix Fish: witness Jesus openly both in this life and in the memories left behind when graduating to heaven. Love and accept others, no matter how different. Get out of the comfort zone and dare to be salty! Put others first. For 2014, I want to live like a Crucifix Fish.

Texas Eugenia Thornhill, in my new Christian mystery-romance-suspense “Fear of Shadows,” reminds me of the lessons of the Crucifix Fish. She is too self-reliant and self-sufficient to need God until she solves the mystery of her fear of shadows. The truth almost destroys her. There is power in the Cross of Jesus, but to tap into it – Texas would need to get out of her comfort zone and get salty. Can the proud, independent Texan who embraces one rebellion after another do that?

http://www.amazon.com/Fear-Shadows-Stephanie-Parker-McKean-ebook/dp/B00HGLRS7O/ref=la_B00BOX90OO_1_6?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1387739222&sr=1-6

The Real Christmas Tree

(Christmas memory, Major Luke Gaines Parker, Aug. 19, 1976 – Nov. 17, 2013)

From the time he was two until he was 11, I was a single parent to my son Luke. We spent seven years in the Great Basin Desert of northern Nevada, exploring deserted caves, ghost towns, and mountain trails. I had told Luke how my siblings and I would go out into the Georgia woods on our property and find the perfect pine tree to cut down and take home for Christmas each year. One year, Luke decided we should go out into the desert and bring home a Christmas tree.

We headed up rough mountain tracks – hardly roads – in search of a real Christmas tree. Trees of any kind are rare in the desert. But we finally found a scraggly, twisted mountain juniper. Luke was delighted. He cut it down himself and we took it home and decorated it, largely with decorations that he made himself.

My seven-year-old son had a real Christmas tree that he had chosen himself. We thought it was beautiful. Enter well-meaning adult visitor. Said visitor looked at the tree in disdain and said, “The least you could do is buy your kid a real tree for Christmas. That’s the ugliest thing I’ve ever seen.”

Imagine Luke’s heartbreak at being told that his tree was ugly and his mom didn’t love him enough to buy a real tree. Truthfully, I didn’t have sufficient funds to spend on a Christmas tree. We had eaten peanut butter and jelly sandwiches on Thanksgiving while the rest of the country ate turkey and watched football games on TV. We didn’t even have a TV.

Off goes officious visitor and returns with a real Christmas tree, professionally decorated and presented to us in a condescending manner that tempted my southern upbringing to “slap the tar out of him.” For the sake of Luke, who now had a real, bright, beautiful, glowing Christmas tree, I bit back both retorts and violent retributions.

Happily convinced that he had improved a single parent and child’s Christmas cheer, the visitor left. Before the engine noise of his vehicle faded into the desert, Luke said, “Mom, I didn’t want to hurt his feelings, but now that’s he’s gone – can I get my real Christmas tree back. It’s prettier than this one.”

We retrieved scraggly mountain juniper and displayed it with honor in the living room. We added some new decorations from the professionally decorated tree, which we put outside the back door to entertain coyotes and ravens. “Luke,” I asked, “I agree that your tree is beautiful, but why do you like it better than the big one?”

“Cause, Mom. It’s like Jesus. It’s real.”

“What makes it more real than the one outside?”

“Jesus made it and planted it. I loved it the first time I saw it, just like Jesus loved me before I got to know Him. Love is what makes things real, Mom. I thought you knew that.”

The real Christmas tree stayed with us until its memory was a whisper of dry needles scattered across the carpet.

Links to books by Stephanie Parker McKean:

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/387341

http://www.amazon.com/Stephanie-Parker-McKean/e/B00BOX90OO/ref=ntt_dp_epwbk_0

Christmas shadows & Lights

For seven years of single parenthood, my son Luke (the late Major Luke Gaines Parker, Aug. 19, 1976-Nov. 17, 2013) and I lived in the Nevada desert. One of our favorite entertainments was holding sagebrush jumping contests – which I hasten to add, he invariably won!

Except the mountains changing colors as clouds pass over them, shadows in the desert are short. Rocks, sagebrush, Russian thistle (tumbleweed), rabbit brush – all cast short shadows and there are virtually no trees. When we moved to the Texas Hill Country, trees along the road threw shadows down and when those shadows hit the road in front of me when I was driving, I got dizzy. It was a silly thing and I couldn’t understand it until Mom’s Christmas present.

Because Mom never had much money to spend on us at Christmas, she came up with unique, affordable gifts like the scrapbook of childhood photos she compiled for each of us one Christmas. It must have taken her weeks of sorting through pictures to get all the photos in the right albums for the right children. Luke loved the pictures of his mom as a child. We were looking at the album one day when I focused in on a small wooden house splattered with shade from trees surrounding it. Suddenly, the picture reached out and grabbed me. I was pulled through the hall to the back door where – partly outside my range of vision – my father was beating something to death. I couldn’t see the victim clearly enough to identify it, and the unexpected image frightened me so badly that I snapped out of the trance. I tried to revisit that picture later when I was alone, but I never could get past the front door again. The image of him pounding something and blood everywhere had terrorized me.

So my newest book, “Fear of Shadows,” was born from that Christmas gift and from the horrendous memory that almost surfaced.

My father was an atheist. He was a cruel wicked man who obeyed no law – God or man-made – except his law: “What’s good for J.L. Potter is good.” As a result, he committed shockingly evil crimes during his lifetime and was one of the first 51 people in the U.S. to die from a newly discovered disease that hadn’t even been named yet. We know it now as AIDS.

“Fear of Shadows” is a Christian mystery-romance-suspense book written from my imagination, not a true story. They say that fact is stranger than fiction. It is a fact that when I was five, my father loaded me, his mother, a Great Dane dog, my grandmother’s dog, and two cats into a wood-paneled station wagon and drove away from California in the middle of the night. He left my sister, my brother, and my pregnant mother behind. We camped out in the then-untamed Florida Everglades swamp along a lagoon with venomous snakes and alligators. We ate bread and peanut butter, and pancakes that my grandmother cooked over an open fire, every day…day after day. All these years later, I still can’t eat pancakes. My father claimed he was looking for work. Perhaps he wanted to herd alligators.

So…who and what was his victim? I don’t know. But I think you’ll enjoy the story that this experience wrote for me. God Bless you and Merry Christmas.

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/387341

Why I Hate Christmas

I hate Christmas.

Hate it because I love giving and Christmas is the perfect season of the year for giving – yet I never have enough money to buy all the things I want to give.

I hate Christmas because imaginary Santa has replaced real Jesus, the Reason for the Season.

I hate Christmas because the emphasis is put on commercial sales rather than on the birth of the Lord Jesus Christ and the gift of eternity that He gives to the world for free.

I hate Christmas because it’s associated with snow and it must be cold to snow.

I hate Christmas because it’s been hijacked by atheists and special interest groups. School children can color pictures of Santa and reindeer on rooftops, but not the manger where Baby Jesus spent His first Christmas. School children can sing nonsense songs about a snowman, but not “Joy to the World, the Lord is Come.”

When Bob, or Marty, or Mary, or Susan have a birthday, we sing, “Happy Birthday, Susan, Mary, Marty, Bob, etc. But on the day that is set aside to celebrate the birth of Jesus, the Savor of the world…we dare not mention His name for fear of offending someone and are expected to say “Happy Holidays” instead of Merry CHRISTmas.

But, really, could anyone hate Christmas?

I love Christmas lights. Jesus is the Light of the World. His brightness is reflected in every glittering bulb that knocks a hole in darkness.

I love Christmas trees. Some equate Christmas trees to pagan history and spurn them. Jesus made trees. Wood was important to Jesus during his lifetime on this earth. He worked with His stepfather Joseph, a carpenter. He carried His cross on His bleeding back. He was crucified on a tree. Some claim a dogwood tree held the Lord Jesus. They point to the blood-stained petals in the shape of a cross with a crown of thorns in the middle. When I look at a Christmas tree, I don’t see a pagan symbol. I see the celebration of creation, redemption and victory over death.

I love Christmas because I love giving. Even though I never seem to be able to give everything I want to give at Christmas, I love a day set aside for giving instead of receiving – small kindnesses like taking baked goodies to neighbors or providing meals for the homeless.

I love Christmas because families come together. Before his death in a plane crash on November 17, my son Marine Corps Major Luke Gaines Parker was planning to fly me from Scotland to North Carolina to spend Christmas with him. He gets to spend his first Christmas in eternity with Jesus while I spend it down here missing him – but I still love Christmas. Every bright and colorful light will remind me of the blessing I had being his mother, however briefly.

So I don’t really hate Christmas. I love Christmas. I love Jesus, the Reason for the Season. And if I never received another Christmas gift in my life, I would be joyful because I’ve already received every blessing of God in this life. I was chosen to be Luke’s mother, and I have the eternal gift of salvation, purchased for me by Jesus at the cost of His blood.

Then there are the added gifts God has bestowed on me; husband and fellow author Alan T McKean, our rough collie dog, Angel Joy, and the gift of writing.

So, Happy Birthday, Jesus! And to all, Merry CHRISTmas!

http://www.amazon.com/Stephanie-Parker-McKean/e/B00BOX90OO/ref=ntt_dp_epwbk_0

Love Stinks

It takes courage to love – because love stinks.

Okay, so I write Christian mystery-romance-suspense books. I should march through life expounding a giddy procession of clichés about love’s virtues. But honestly – love stinks.

Love stinks because only those we love possess the power to hurt us. We can be callous and indifferent when taunted by enemies, but when someone we love criticizes us, we shatter.

Love stinks because it ends. I met a fellow dog walker today. We fell into each others arms and cried – me because my son had graduated from earth to heaven, she because her loyal doggie companion had done the same. No matter what the object of one’s love, the pain of loss is devastating.

Husband, wife, friend, lover, companion, child, pet, wildlife, flower, tree – every object that we find the courage to love will be lost to us someday. I can write romance novels. I can write happy endings. But I can’t take the hurt out of love. I can’t make it smell good.

Yet, without love, life would be a desert wasteland. Love splashes life and color into every drab corner of human existence. Love fires the souls of writers, poets, dreamers, achievers. Love is the only heart condition that makes living worth the pain and effort. The Bible promises that love never fails.

Love stunk for Jesus, too. Because He loved us, Jesus allowed Himself to be mocked, whipped, have His beard plucked out and thorns pounded into His head. Love nailed Jesus to the cross. Love kept Him there. He could have called angels to rescue Him, but Jesus chose to stay on the cross and die for our sins. Love stinks.

Jesus spent three days in hell – because I’m bad, not because He was bad. Then Jesus snatched the keys of death away from satan, and rose victorious. Jesus broke the power of sin and death and handed us the victory.

Without the stinking love of Jesus, Heaven would be out of reach for us.

Love won’t stink in Heaven. Love will be a fragrant perfume that never dissipates and that lasts for all eternity.

So perhaps love doesn’t stink. Perhaps I can keep writing romance novels, some with happy endings. When sorrow finds a resting place inside my heart, a rose will bloom in its shadow.

http://www.amazon.com/Stephanie-Parker-McKean/e/B00BOX90OO/ref=ntt_dp_epwbk_0

Knife to the heart

There’s no knife to the heart in this short blog about Major Luke Gaines Parker who graduated from the U.S. Marine Corps to Heaven on Nov. 17, 2013 – except for the wound left in the heart of his mother. But there are knives in the story – so keep reading!

Luke isn’t dead. His plane crashed. The outer shell of his body will be buried at Arlington National Cemetery on Tuesday, Dec. 3, but Luke went straight from the sky into the arms of Jesus. So many people have poured out love, support and praise for Luke that I wanted to share a bit of what made him special.

I was raised an atheist. When Luke was four, I had only just discovered Jesus and started reading my Bible and going to church. We had no vehicle and sometimes we nearly missed the bus home from my work. So my four-year-old said, “Mom, why don’t you pray for a truck?” I was afraid to pray for a truck. What would happen to Luke’s faith if we prayed and didn’t get a truck? What would happen to mine? Luke had no doubts. He prayed for a truck. We got one the next day.

Luke read his Bible and believed it. He read that with faith, a person could move mountains. So when he got warts, he asked Jesus to remove them. Jesus did.

When our truck was sputtering and I didn’t think we’d make it home, Luke slapped his hands confidently on the dash and said, “Get the hens, Satan. Get the hens.” Puzzled, I asked him about the hens, only to find that he meant, “Get thee hence, Satan.” God wasn’t confused. The truck made it home.

From snakes and turtles to all things bigger and smaller, Luke loved animals and rescued them. He saved songbirds from bee traps and raised a one-legged baby raven. I found him hanging upside down in a tree one day teaching a baby opossum how to climb. When he ran a marathon in New York City, a bird landed on his shoulder. He fed it drops of water until it revived and flew away.

Luke accomplished everything his heart set out to do. When he wanted to learn to play the trumpet, he did. When he wanted to learn to play the piano, he did. When he wanted to join the Marine Corps and was told he couldn’t because he needed a steel rod to straighten his back, he got prayer for his back. Jesus healed his back and Luke started running up to eight miles a day – every day – to prepare for basic training. He worked his way up in the Marine Corps from enlisted to major. He graduated from college even though he froze during tests. He learned to fly a plane, then bought his own plane. He flew in air shows and preformed aerobatics. But that’s not why I’m so proud of him.

Luke walked with God. When he was in basic training, some of the guys got drunk and tried to get Luke to drink. He refused. When their mocking and taunts continued, Luke got into his bunk and covered himself with a sheet. In the morning, Luke’s mattress was slashed all around his body. One slash had just missed his heart.

When Luke was in Iraq, one of the men wrote in the newsletter, “No matter what we do, we can’t make Captain Parker cuss.”

Luke loved his wife and daughter. He was a great dad to his little girl. He walked with God. The Marines lost a man. I lost a son who walked with God.

Life is never long enough

Today, November 19, 2013, I learned that I must say goodbye to the best son any mother ever had, Marine Corps Major Luke Parker, who was killed in a plane crash Sunday. Life is never long enough when you love someone.

When I look back to my time as Luke’s mother, I know I was blessed by the LORD that He chose me out of all the other women on earth to be Luke’s mom.

Luke was hyperactive before hyper became a buzz word. At the doctor’s office, other children sat in their mother’s laps. Luke jumped off furniture, tore around the room like a wild fox, and shouted with laughter when I tried to catch him. When I finally caught him and attempted to restrain him, he screamed so loudly that we were taken into a waiting room in the back. There wasn’t enough space for him to bounce and run there, and by the time we left the doctor’s office I needed treatment for a raging headache. The Marine Corps was the perfect career for his boundless energy. He began training before he was out of high school, running four to six miles a day in every kind of weather.

Luke was born loving animals and they sensed that and loved him in return. Once when he was walking in New York, a thirsty bird landed on his shoulder. Luke feed the bird drops of water until it recovered and flew away. With Luke’s help, we rescued and saved dogs, cats, ravens opossums, frogs, tadpoles, snakes, lizards. I walked outside one day to find Luke hanging upside down in a tree teaching a baby opossum how to climb.

When Luke was four, the “experts” at a children’s clinic in Reno, Nevada, informed me that Luke had learning and developmental issues and would never do well in school or be particularly successful. My answer was, “As long as he loves Jesus and serves Him, I don’t care.”

The experts were wrong and Luke achieved everything he ever wanted to do. When he decided he wanted to play a trumpet, he learned. When he wanted to learn to play the piano, he took a few lessons and wound up playing in church. He was a skilled artist and poet, and in spite of the fact that he said he hated writing, he was entrusted to write newsletters for his Marine Corps unit. He decided he needed a college diploma and graduated from Stephen F Austin. He decided he wanted to learn to fly and earned not only a pilot’s license, but also his instrument and instructor’s ratings. He fell in love with an old army jeep and bought it and rebuilt and painted it from the ground up, learning as he went. He decided he wanted to buy a plane and found one of the only 19 surviving Focke Wulf planes in the world, which he kept in pristine shape. He and the plane went down on Sunday, Nov. 17. If he could have chosen the way to go – that’s what he would have chosen. From the sky into the arms of Jesus.

I could be proud that Luke made the rank of Major; that he graduated from college; that he and his plane performed in air shows; that he ran marathons. I am proud of all those things, but what I am most proud of him for is for having been a great dad to his daughter and walking with God.

Luke read his Bible nearly every day and prayed constantly. He would want me to use this opportunity to encourage you to consider where you will be when you die and make sure it’s heaven. You’ll get to see him there! Because of Luke, one of my favorite Bible verses is 3 John 4, “I have no greater joy than to hear that my children walk in truth.”

Proud of you, Son. Thank you for walking in truth. I’ll see you soon!

Feather in the Wind

The old cliché birds of a feather flock together proves itself daily here in Fortrose, Scotland. Crows congregate in the stand of evergreen trees along Rosemarkie Beach and seagulls monopolize the rock-strewn mouth of the stream that gladdens the glen. Being sociable critters, they do mix and mingle – but at the end of the day – they are totally segregated.

Jesus named God’s greatest commandments as loving Him first, then loving other people as much as we love ourselves. First John explains: “For this is the message that you have heard from the beginning, that we should love one another…let us not love in word or in tongue, but in deed and truth…let us love one another, for love is of God; and everyone who loves is born of God and knows God…God is love.”

Jesus’ Holy Spirit draws Christians together. Like birds, we gravitate toward other Christians in joyous fellowship. Unlike birds, however, we should never segregate ourselves from non-Christians. The way we conduct our lives may be the only Bible that some people ever read. We need to be close enough they can see the print!

The famous passage in Ecclesiastes states, “To everything there is a season, a time for every purpose under heaven.” There is a time and a reason for segregation. It’s called sin. Christians are commanded by the Bible to come away from sin and be separate.

Just as the ground at the cross is level and everyone born into this world has an equal opportunity to reach out to Jesus for salvation and forgiveness, so too are sins level. Viewing actions from our human perspective we condemn murder as the ultimate crime. Yet God hates all sin. The same God who said, “Thou shalt not murder,” also called profanity, gossip, evil speaking, pride, and anger sins and forbid them. Under God’s law, the penalty for sin is death. Any sin. Anger as well as murder.

Thankfully, Jesus died for us so that we can be forgiven and have eternal life. We don’t have to die for our sins. Jesus already did that. Even so, to know something is wrong and do it anyway is rather like nailing Jesus to the cross again. That’s why things like clean conversation and lifestyle, both in my life and in my books, is important to me.

Want to live a victorious life with such deep peace and joy that no circumstance can uproot it? Release sin, cling fast to God. Dare to be a feather in the wind, dependent on God for the journey.

http://www.amazon.com/Stephanie-Parker-McKean/e/B00BOX90OO/ref=ntt_dp_epwbk_0