Altar Tending

I spent yesterday afternoon in an ancient old home with ship’s ballast steps, hand-hewn logs from ancient trees and chimneys built with petrified wood as old as the earth.  Oh, the tales that old home could tell, of blood and birth and death and pain, of life and hope and knees bent—oh the knees that were surely bent by firelight and lamplight and barely creeping dawn light.  If I could I would have built an altar there in the front room before the fireplace.  I would look out over the cotton fields, the forest grove that surrounded us, that ancient old sky that promised rain and I would have slowly built an altar.  There was a tiny little life, clinging to my wife while staring at me, an altar himself, built by God Himself, to Himself—the altars name I believe is IV.  It is an ancient old home filled with altars in varying states of repair.