Todd Rivetti

One of the best experiences of my childhood was selling extra vegetables from our garden at a makeshift stand at the end of our driveway. I did this between the ages of 8 and 11. The rich soil in our garden often yielded extra cucumbers, tomatoes, peppers, and green beans. Our family was never flush with cash, so it was a big deal when my brothers and I were able to pocket money from selling the extra produce from our garden.

But – one of the best things about our little business venture was that the whole time we were open for business – we played baseball in the field next to our driveway with a group of kids who lived nearby. Each time someone stopped their car to buy our garden produce we halted the game – collected our cash – and then went back to playing. It was the perfect mixture of efficient play and a money-making activity. In some ways, I think the seeds for always searching for a healthy balance of work and play were planted deep within me during those wonderful summer afternoons when we collected cash while playing baseball.

 

One of my favorite desserts is cherry pie. For a large portion of my childhood, my mother baked two cherry pies each Saturday. They were amazing! Just the right mixture of sugar and sour cherries with a small splash of vanilla extract nestled between a perfectly flaky pie-crust. The smell would make my head spin in anticipation of the best treat possible.

Each summer we would travel about an hour north to near Lake Erie to pick cherries. We spent the day in the trees picking. And then after coming home, would spend the evening and well into the night pitting the cherries and preparing them for freezing. We usually picked enough for 150 pies. Each of my siblings (there were five of us), my mother, and my grandmother (who at the time was in her mid-sixties) would pick from early morning to mid-afternoon.

One particular time while picking, I was in a tree carrying on a conversation with my grandmother who was in another tree nearby. Our conversation went all over the place like they usually did…anything to make the day go faster and distract from the work. As I glanced over in the middle of talking, I watched in horror as my grandmother, who had climbed off her tall ladder and ventured higher into the branches of a tree, began to fall. As usual, she was wearing a dress that went slightly below her knees. At the sight of her falling I stopped talking while my eyes grew wide. I watched as she glided down the branches of the tree, her back-side brushing hard against each new row of branches. As she descended to the ground, she landed on her fee…and said “Oh!…that was something…” Then acted like nothing out of the ordinary had happened, climbed back up into the tree and continued talking and picking.

 

We’ve started our pre-season training for wrestling. Wrestling is a wonderful sport that requires an athlete to work on variety of skills. One of the most important is referred to as hip awareness. Gaining an awareness of your hips and how to position them is really important in all of the martial arts – but particularly the grappling arts (wrestling, judo, jui-jit-su, etc.). In fact, in my opinion, it’s the most important aspect of learning how to perform in any of the martial arts. Power for all kicks and punches is transferred through the hips. When you’re countering or defending against your opponent, the best way to figure out what they’re doing is to concentrate on their hips. You can see everything…and I mean everything…from someone’s hips. Whether they’re attacking or retreating…reaching, punching, blocking, kicking, rising up, settling back…whatever…I can tell by concentrating my attention on a person’s hips exactly what they’re up to. The hips tell me everything…

In the story of Jacob wrestling with the angel/God in Genesis, the story ends with Jacob limping away because his hip was injured. This story gathers together so many elements of how our struggle with God affects us at the center of our being. No other injury captures so much about our struggle as a hip injury. And that struggle affects everything. All relationships are touched by the struggle…and will show the signs forever. We all limp…because we have to – we’ve been affected by our struggle…in our relationship with God…and that history…will show visible signs in some way or another…

Peter didn’t know what he was getting into when he began a relationship with Jesus. He enthusiastically declared his loyalty. He seemed to want to remain faithful in the face of coming trouble. Yet – he denied Jesus three times. Facing his failure was devastating. But then Jesus came along side and declared forgiveness to Peter – three times (see John 21). Jesus illustrated the forgiveness – he did it creatively and imaginatively. The relationship was restored.

Most of us don’t really know what we’re getting into when we enter relationships – especially in marriage. To preserve those relationships, being able to forgive is absolutely critical. There’s going to be stuff that needs to be forgiven. To help our forgiveness to be more effective, we need to imaginatively approach all aspects of it. When seeking to restore relationships, creative showing of forgiveness rather than simply telling makes such a difference. Words are important – but other elements can be added to the message of forgiveness. Those added elements can align with whatever we say. When we creatively and imaginatively add to our words, our message of forgiveness becomes so much stronger.

 

During the summer between my freshman and sophomore years in college, I worked for a brick mason contractor. We spent most of that summer doing the brick work on an apartment complex in Reynolds, PA. The crew was made up of a wide assortment of interesting characters. One of the most interesting was a guy named Wes. He was an older African American man in his early sixties. I’m certain he was one of the most intelligent men with whom I’ve ever interacted. His perceptive abilities were uncanny. He sized up problems on the job site and immediately chose the best solution.

One morning, when we were on our 10 minute coffee break, Wes motioned to me to come over to talk. He was a man of very few words so I was almost taken aback when he called me over. As I sat down next to him he simply said, “You take too many steps.” I looked at him with a questioning face. He said again, “You take too many steps”…but then he added the magic words…“Watch me…do what I do.” So I did. I watched Wes for the next few days. It was amazing! He wasted nothing…time or motion. He was never in a hurry, yet never stopped moving. He always had a tool of some sort in his hands, even when moving from one task to another (cleaning a shovel, scraping a trowel). All tools were always clean and ready for use. To this day, I measure my effectiveness in nearly everything by comparing myself to Wes.

Last week while visiting my brother he told of falling off a ladder earlier in the summer while cleaning at his house. He talked about how lucky he felt that he wasn’t seriously hurt. It reminded me of the many times I’ve fallen while working and how thankful I am that I was never hurt. The most serious fall for me happened during my college years.

During the summer between my sophomore and junior years I worked for a construction company pouring concrete. I spent most of that summer helping to build an addition to a GE manufacturing facility in Grove City, PA. On one particular occasion we were pouring concrete in the water treatment area of the facility. We had dug a huge hole in the ground. A carpenter crew had spent over a week building the wooden braces around the sides of the hole. Iron workers had built an elaborate rebar frame at the base of the hole which would receive the concrete as part of the foundation. This rebar frame also had many individual rebar spikes sticking upward to within a half inch of where top of the concrete would be poured. The carpenters had also built a wooden chute that went from the top of the hole at ground level, all the way to near the bottom of the hole. About half way down into the hole the carpenters had built a temporary walkway for workers on the concrete crew to encircle the hole and reach down into the hole with concrete rakes and automatic vibrators to coax the concrete into a level state.

On the day of the pour we finally began guiding the concrete into the hole at around 7:00 pm. Truck after truck pulled up to the area where the chute stuck out of the hole as the trucks emptied their contents. My job during that particular time was to rotate between running the vibrator and moving concrete around with a very long handled rake and shovel. After we had been pouring for about 30 minutes, the contents of one particular cement truck were not well mixed. On several occasions, large balls of concrete (what we called “meatballs”) came out of the truck and became stuck in the chute on the way down. Usually we just reached up the chute with a long handled shovel and worked the ball free. The contents would then spill down. Unfortunately, one time, the “meatball” got stuck way up at the top of the chute. I looked at the rest of the guys and said “I’ll get it.”

I loosened the belt around my pants (I wasn’t wearing a shirt – never did on construction jobs), fed the belt through the u-shaped handle of a short shovel and re-fastened the belt. I climbed up the slimy chute in a bear-crawl fashion using both hands and feet. When I finally got within reach, I loosened my belt again and took hold of the shovel. I reached up with the shovel and jabbed the “meatball.” After two or three stabs, the “meatball” broke free and all the concrete that had built up behind it came rushing down. I floated a few feet with the concrete and then fell over the side of the chute. I let go of the shovel as I began a free fall toward the bottom. Thankfully, my right arm and left leg caught onto two braces that stuck out from the side of the hole to support the walkway. I was suspended above the bottom with the rebar jutting up menacingly close to my bare torso.

The foreman of our crew looked like a caricature of a construction worker. He was big, loud, and very strong. He came running over, bent down to reach me and scooped me up like a baby. I had never seen him scared. His eyes were huge as he continued to bounce me up and down while excitedly yelling over and over, “Are you ok…Are you ok?” I said, “Yeeessss…put me down.” He said, “I’ve never lost a man yet – you scared the shit out of me…Don’t do that again…” I said – “Don’t worry, I’m not going to climb up any more chutes today.”

I climbed up the ladder from the walkway and went to the water hose to clean the concrete off my body. We finished pouring the remainder of the concrete in short order. The whole way home while riding my motorcycle my mind kept replaying my fall. I decided this was one story I would keep to myself….my mother didn’t need to hear this one…in fact – I don’t think I ever told her this one…

I attended a small liberal arts college in southwestern Ohio. It was affiliated with a conservative Baptist denomination (it is now affiliated with the most conservative wing of the Southern Baptist Convention). I first decided to attend this school because they had offered me a very generous financial aid package that included several scholarships and grants. I had decided to attend for the first year. If I didn’t like it, I would transfer to Penn State. On the first day of classes I wandered into my freshman writing class. It was held late in the afternoon in a wing of the library building whose windows looked out over a grassy area. As I entered the classroom I noticed a man sitting in the back of the room staring out the window with his eyes on the clear blue sky. I took a seat slightly to the other side of the room from the man staring out the window. Within a minute or two the remainder of the other students had entered the room.

At the instant the class was to begin, the man in the back of the room tilted his head slightly back and said – “Who is God?” All of us stared at the man…and then each other. Wasn’t this an English class…a writing class? We squirmed in our seats…what was this guy trying to do here? A few people cleared their throats and offered stock, church-type, abstract answers – “God is the creator of everything….God is our father…God is the almighty one”…and on and on. Then the man, whom we now assumed was the professor, spun around in his seat and said, “But where in the bible does God describe himself?” (Yes, – this was a conservative evangelical college in September, 1980…so the masculine pronoun had to be used to refer to God). Again, we students stared at one another. No one had an answer. Then the professor asked, “Well, when does God refer to himself? Doesn’t he describe himself there?” In chorus many of us chimed in about God talking to Moses at the burning bush. “How does he refer to himself – exactly?” asked the professor. We quoted the King James Version of that interaction between God and Moses, “I AM hath sent me…”

The professor began to smile slightly, “Does that make any sense?” he asked. “I am – present tense. Hath sent – past tense.” Then he went into a longer soliloquy about God and time (something about which this eighteen year-old boy had never thought). The teacher finished with a broad smile on his face, and looking directly at us delivered this stark statement – “God is not subject to the rules of grammar; however, you are. And we will be concentrating on those rules quite a lot in this class.” That professor’s name was Ron Grosh. Because of him I decided to pursue a double major that included English. He agreed to become my academic advisor, and would eventually become a dear friend.

Father’s Day always brings back wonderful memories of my Dad. One of those is of a time over Christmas break during my junior year in college. I wanted to visit a friend who lived in central Ohio. She lived on a farm. I only had a motorcycle and couldn’t travel 3 hours in the frigid winter weather. So, I asked my father to borrow his truck for a few days to make the trip. His truck was absolutely critical to his livelihood as a foreman on a masonry construction crew. We had very little money – so obviously, he wasn’t thrilled to have his college-age son borrowing it. If something went wrong I had no means of replacing or repairing anything. I was able to convince him to let me visit by agreeing to bring a load of chopped fire-wood home from my friend’s family farm. After the visit, I loaded the truck with as much wood as I could fit. The truck had tool boxes attached to the top of the sides of the bed that allowed me to fill the bed to the top of the cab, completely covering the rear window of the cab. The truck sunk low. The front of the hood tilted a bit higher with the full load in the rear.

I pulled away from the farm and drove onward through winding country roads until getting to Conshohocken, Ohio. Just before getting onto the major highway, I decided to pull into a service station to fill up with gas. While pumping gas, I looked at the tires. They seemed low. I moved the truck over to the air pump and started putting air into the tires. Unfortunately I neglected to check the air pressure with a hand gauge. The air pump simply had a hose attached to the compressor without a gauge indicating the pressure. I continued putting air into the tires, but they still looked low. All of a sudden, a cannon-like boom-sound pierced the quiet. I stared in horror as the tire had exploded off the rim which now sat on empty rubber.

I walked over to the station and entered. There was a group of guys sitting in a circle. The largest one who was holding court with his friends said “What was that?” I said, “I think I put too much air in the tire.” He started to laugh. I said, “Can I borrow your portable lift to help put on the spare.” Because of the huge load of wood I couldn’t use the normal, small jack to lift the truck to change the tire. The large laughing guy walked out of the garage and stared at my father’s truck. He roared in laughter and called to his friends to come and look. They all spilled out and joined him in slapping knees and bobbing heads. The big guy’s laughter grew so hard he could no longer talk. He simply wheezed and waved his arm toward the portable lift for me to use it. I dragged the lift out of the station and placed it under the truck while they continued to gawk and laugh. It took me what seemed like forever to change the tire. The whole time I could still hear the guys who had moved back inside the station continuing to laugh about my predicament. I finished putting the spare tire on, returned the lift, and continued onto the highway.

When I finally got home, I told the story to my Dad. He rubbed his forehead, went outside to look at his truck, and shook his head. Then he started to laugh. “I bet that sound scared you half to death,” he said. “You have no idea,” I said. We started to unload the wood together and transport it behind a fence in the back of our yard. He chuckled a bit more throughout the unloading. By the end I was even starting to laugh. His patience is something I’ll always appreciate. He waited until summer for me to pay him back to replace the tire.

I consider it a privilege to serve with Sandy Cove Ministries because one of their major focal points is running a summer kid’s camp. Summer youth camp had a significant place in my early spiritual formation. I attended a wonderful camp located on an island in the middle of Lake Erie. The camp was situated on a wide peninsula that stuck out towards Canada. The property stretched from one side of the peninsula on the west to the other side on the east. Each day we could view the sun rising and setting over water. One of my earliest experiences of deep connection with God came while watching a sunset when I was about 12 years old after a particularly rough storm had just passed over the island. After the storm, the water from the lake continued to leap over the rocks that lined the shore. I was sitting on a bench along the western side just as the clouds began to break apart and the sun began to peek gently through small creases. A riot of colors splashed across the evening sky. In that moment, I was overwhelmed by the beauty that stretched out in front of me. I was convinced of the goodness of God. The gift of that sunset has stayed with me for over 40 years. Through many changes in theological perspectives, one thing has remained – a sense of God’s goodness. I’m sure that experiences like I had at camp were critical in forming that sense – and I’m thankful for those who made that camp experience possible.

The cost of truth-telling in human relationships is sometimes high. Often the road to determining how to tell the truth well seems rocky and steep. Shakespeare’s King Lear brings this point home, expressed in many layers over the course of the play. I will always be grateful for the long, nuanced conversations about this play that I had with my favorite teacher, Jody Grosh. Reading it again last night reminded me of the unique treasures that always appear with each new experience of the play. Some of the lines I enjoy and find most interesting include these by Cordelia:

Cordelia: Unhappy that I am, I cannot heave

My heart into my mouth, I love your Majesty

According to my bond, no more no less.

Lear: How, how Cordelia! Mend your speech a little,

Lest it may mar your fortunes.

Cordelia: Good my lord,

You have begot me, bred me, loved me. I

Return those duties back as are right fit.

Obey you, love you, and most honor you.

Why have my sisters husbands if they say they love you all?

Haply, when I shall wed,

That lord whose hand must take my plight, shall carry

Half my love with him, half my care and duty.

Sure, I shall never marry like my sisters,

To love my father all.

(Act I, Scene 1, lines 93 – 106)