Do You Have Glory?

Do you ever give glory?  Do you have it to give away?  I don’t know the answer to the first, but I do the second, a resounding “Yes!!!” Oxygen, light, and love can begin your list.  But what is glory?  Glory is the feeling I get when I realize how great everything is that keeps me alive: healing, cell division, seeing, resonance, sun, touching, empathy, gravity, stars, rhyme, consciousness, DNA, lift, heat, and wind. An infinite list of overwhelming provisions for my existence which I do nothing to receive, and I end up with a lot of glory I need to give to something or someone.  It is an overwhelming feeling of needing to be and do something. It is a fact that without graces abundant, intricate, beautiful design of everything including me, there would be nothing, including me.  It gives grace a real meaning, and grace produces glory.  I have an abundance of glory, but it's not for me but for me to give away.  But to what?  To who?  This is the main reason we build Tabernacles, Temples, Cathedrals, steeples, St. Fillian’s hall, and make sculpture.  Those are the best hints to what or Who, I can give my glory to.  Having so much glory and never giving it away would be despairing.    

Betty and I stopped to pray in this small church in Mexico.  It reminded me of the same glory given in Giotto's chapel ceiling in Scrovegni Chapel in Italy

      

Spred'in Out, Chaa Ching

We are adding on, yesterday began our big spreading out, making more room, giving space for all those of us.  At last count, we are 20 and one on the way.  Twenty-one takes up a lot of room.     

“Enlarge the site of your tent, stretch out the curtains of your dwellings, do not hold back.  Lengthen your ropes and drive your stakes in deep.  For you will spread out to the right and left…”  Isaiah 54:2,3a

Tents cost a lot more today, a whole lot more!!!

 

Titles We Give Light

Black to ebony, and walaa, INDIGO.  This is the magical moment made by the slightest sliver of light.  It is the first promise of light, of dawn, a promise more hope than seen.  It is mostly in our hearts to see light where we know it will be.  The assurance light is coming, to hope upon hope that a new day is given, and in the thought, the reality of the grand gifted miracle of it all.  I keep raising my head to please myself that the ebony is there, it separating the land and mountains from the river and sky.  Oh yes, there it is now.  A distinct evaporation of ebony to indigo.  The words giving the light a title barely worthy of it.  Colors to name light; for there is no known thing as color, only titles we give varying amounts of light.       

A Known Wanderer of Wanderers

*I am a wanderer like my parents.  We wandered over the earth, over Tennessee, I went to sea, and now I am in the middle of the three places I was raised, born in Athens, moved to Jefferson City and then to Crab Orchard, and this is who I am.  I am a part of these people, my people.  I am like them, and they like me.  We are God fearing, country folk, opinionated, stubborn, hard-working, strong-willed, and passionate.  We have lots of preachers, teachers, and drunks.  Storytellers, clannish, people of the earth.  We are mountain folk, tied to the hollows, creeks, rocks and rivers, trees and mountains.  We’re common sensers, writers, dreamers, neighborly, givers, raise and bury, hunt, fish, gather, hoard, live sparsely and grandly on the land.  God, Christ Lord, the Holy Spirit are ours. They’re sewn in our ancestors, woven in our families, invited to our tables, funerals, gatherings.  They are the most honored guests in all our comings and goings.  We are what you call God’s people,  He, They are our guides, our tear gatherers, our hellfire and heaven bounders, we give our dead to Them, pledge our babies to Them, and eventually our souls go to Them to await our new bodies.  We think this is normal, see no odds in this, and call it faith.  We are wanderers, and by faith, we know we will eventually wander with Them around Glory.  They’re with us all our lives, like our ancient ones, who we know not now, but know we will know then, as we will be known; wanders.                                                                                                                                               *On reading Genesis 12-14

  

 

Moon Promises

The days have been grey of late, the river and the sky broken only by the thin line of mountains beyond.  Last evening, I sat and gazed out at eventide, cold, and slate rain.  There was no sun to give a hint of time passing, earth rotating, day ending.  This morning, I awoke and stood outside in the dark, and I could still feel it, the damp grey above.  I turned and came back in, filled my coffee cup, and sat with Him.  After a while, I was nudged to look up, and there the moon had nipped a hole in the grey to gently and faithfully remind me of what He had just told me;

“As long as the earth endures

seedtime and harvest,

cold and heat,

summer and winter, 

day and night,

will never cease.”

Amen

 

First Time Ever I Saw...The Earth

After reading Genesis 1 & 2, I thought, how could I ever be thankful enough?  So I wrote down all the songs I felt were grateful songs that I would write after creation. 

First Time Ever I Saw Your Face

How Great Thou Art

Let It Be

Amazing Grace

Poems, Prayers and Promises

Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain

Hallelujah

Abraham, Martin, and John

Hallelujah Chorus

The Old Rugged Cross

Free Bird

I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing

Thou, Oh Lord (by Brooklyn Tabernacle Choir)

The Doxsology

God, what would I give you besides these songs?  My heart, and after You accepted it, I would have put these songs in it.  You are so good.  Thank You.   

"Morning Has Broken" could easily have made 
my list.

Thing: Anything or How Do You Do Eternity

A long time ago, in a place far away, You Three conceived of all things: the animals, the ears, the hair, tails, fins, colors, shapes, and sizes.  The heavens and spheres abounded in glory, and colors, and lights, and spaces, and distances incomprehensible, and lights and light that never stops expanding since You Three said, “Let there be light!”  And plants, flowers, trees, grasses, fruits, nuts, cocoa bean, sugar cane, and on and on and food and fuel cover the earth.  Birds fly, the sky is made blue, we get a star, oceans have waves, Mount Everest and Brown (our mountain) are made, Betty, Aaron, Sissy, Zac, Sarah, and our new grandson are conceived, the Big Dipper, Ozone Falls, baby elephants, Fair Haven, The Tennessee River, the Mississippi, oranges…It becomes mind-expanding, heartwarming, soul-praising, knees bowing, good.  It never ends for us.  Once it begins, it is eternal.  We are eternal.  Of all thoughts, this is the one that must be reconciled.  How do we do eternity?  We can’t.  Only You Three can and coming into us by faith make us eternally alive, me, glorious as I was intended to be, eternal, one with You All, forever.

This Story, the Greatest Story ever told, must be applied to me every day.  I must apply “In the beginning God” to my story every day.  You Three are the only story I have to be me.  This Story is the only thing that makes all other people, places, and things make sense.  I just looked up “thing” in the dictionary,  “Anything.”  That is what I am trying to explain.  Genesis 1 and 2 are the You Three, telling me how I began, how all “things” began.  And it is the only “thing” that makes all things make sense (including sense).  That thing (including sense) made me happy.  Happy, another thing that makes me happy.  I could keep repeating here, but I will stop.  (stop: thing)  Happy again.  

On reading Genesis 1 & 2.

Yesterday, splitting fire for next winter.