A Mighty Boulder In My Wretched Stream

Oh, what a wretched mess we are in, COVID, politics, riots, and the constant screeching heads!  I’ll admit it is pervasive but not for me.  I struggle with sorrow and sorrowfulness but like a massive boulder in a stream, it flows around me but not over me and certainly not in me.  As an artist, I am prone to depression, melancholia, anxiety, an overwhelming sense of responsibility for the world but I have found a balm in a quiet and prolonged aloneness with God.  He is the boulder I sit upon which keeps me in the stream but not overwhelmed by it.

    

Good morning Father, nice cooldown!!!  I can feel fall around the corner, trees are waning, days are shortening, crops are coming in.  You have a marvelous way with routine that comforts humans, a season seems long enough, summer has almost been spent, and then comes fall with its leaves, pumpkins, flannel, and putting in firewood.  God, what was your process?  Did you think about seasons for a while, did it take you years or centuries or millennia or was it just a twinkling of your perfection?  God, you are a great mystery that shared yourself with us in Jesus but that was certainly a twinkling, and the Bible, again a twinkling, just moments of sacred ecstasy, purest gold, red gold, heavy with meaning but with a cosmic storehouse of secrets.  God, you are so good, so kind, seasons are just a sampling of wonder unimaginable, of goodness that if only momentarily considered produces a physical response of smiling, contented joy.  Dawn is now pushing the darkness back west, the Great Tennessee is reflective of your heavens, the world is waking, my night has once again become day before me.  You are a good, good God and a Mighty Boulder in my daily stream.