The Hymns of Earth

It is raining, grey morning, clouds lowered to half mountain, the air filled with wet mist.  The earth lays still and quiet.  It is refusing to get up, taking a day off, a few much-needed hours of lingering quietly over rivers, hills, and dales.  It has earned a rest from its labors.  God commands a fallow year for Earth every seven years.  It is to lay up on its laurels, a year of repose to enjoy itself, to testify to God’s goodness even to its valleys, trees, rivers, and mountainsides.  This God is here for everyone and everything, to bring us all joy.  How desperately dull we are to pass by the daily life of the earth and never listen to the hymns it sings.  A man is so much more the man when he is deliberate in his notice of the earth; “That they should develop keen perceptive faculties is no more remarkable than that a carpenter should hit a nail instead of the thumb that steadies it.”*  Go man with God. 

*Horace Kephart, The Book of Camping and Woodcraft, pg 206

Aware-ingly Looking

I walk around and look at her, examining her for any joys or wounds she might have experienced in my absence.  This is my habit concerning Fair Haven.  After days of being away, I walk over her, up and down her hills and valleys, down her length and breadth, through her and around her.  I am reacquainting myself with her.  It is a great joy to have a bit of the earth and a little of her to call mine while I am here.  For she does not belong to me.  No part of the earth belongs to us.  It is loaned, by a great kindness of grace, of its Maker.  Its loan is also with the expectation of care and betterment.  I am to help the earth, keeping it clean and guarded against any and everything that might reduce its productivity and limit its possibilities.  I am also to add to it, plant, grow, feed, and nourish it with new growth and new growing things.  So I walk over her, lovingly looking at her, giving my attention to her, and in this, she gives me the satisfaction of showing herself to me, for I see her only as I aware-ingly look.  It is akin to seeing my lover…but I move to a higher elation there, so I will end here, with Fair Haven.    

 

Be It Ever So Humble

Nothing so endears one to home than tramping around the earth.  It is good to be home.  Being in the wilderness urges you to make it a part of your daily life, to place yourself under its testimonies and quiet assurances of goodness, beauty, and His care.  Home and hearth should always be abundant in the grace and goodness of His provisions, His creative abundance, and ways of liturgy nature has so displayed for you as you walked her hills and valleys, back woods, and canyon streams.  God should be as welcome in our homes as He is in the open spaces He created.  A mountain and a stream are as humbly welcoming as a warm and welcoming home…and be it ever so humble,  in your making, there is no place like home.  

 

 

An Expert Witness

Back in that same hotel, waiting to fly home later this afternoon.  I will wake up in Fair Haven tomorrow.  I can’t think of any place I’d rather be!  God has gifted me with a sliver of His world, and it is kind.  I am listening to Nat King Cole, my lover lounges on the bed reading The Ancient Text.  I have been with Him.  Everyone should go camping once a year.  It realigns you and gives you insight into your smallness and the earth's bigness.  Every moment it confronts you with your limits and limitedness.  You can’t do anything about the earth, it just is, but in its “isness,” it also testifies it does not run itself, its masterfulness, exactness, enormity, overwhelming craftedness, creativity, and beauty testified to its needfulness for a Maker.  And therein lies our need for it, its testimonies are true, it is an expert witness, all He needs to win His already stated verdict; I AM!

Betty, on our last hike in Abilene, SP, in a grove of Texas Live Oaks
giving us their expert testimony.

 

Never Saw Willie

Rode hard and put up wet

That old cowboy saying about their horse aptly describes my lover and me.  We are road-weary and long for home.  We are camped just outside Austin and turn our RV in at 11a.m.  These last few days have been a long haul across most of Texas to get us back to Austin, where we fly out tomorrow evening.  We have loved our time here, but the panhandle is broken up between oil fields, refineries, miles of open cropland, and long stretches of empty which they fill with wind turbines.  These things are so intrusive, overwhelming everything else.  But ending on a high note.  We were headed to our campsite on this backroad and came across Luckenbach, Texas, as in “with Waylon, Willie and the boys…”  What a treat.  Had a band of old men playing on and outside stage.  Never saw Willie. 

    

 

Overwhelmed With Events

America is still here, awake, going about our work of the day.  Many are in turmoil, seem forsaken and lost for what to do, and overwhelmed with events.  Many are elated, over the moon, victory-lapping, and overwhelmed with events.  Such is life.  Life goes on, and no matter what side you are on most of life is lost to our understanding.  Good people die, laughter is good medicine, cancer happens, grandbabies are born, North Carolina is flooded, planes fly, everyone can’t sing, roses, bad people make out, dogs are nice, and we get old and broken.  Life more often than not, does not make sense.  What are we to do.  I am a follower of Christ, and if He has taught me one thing, it is this, I will not understand most of life.  It is what He came to help me with.  It is called faith, faith that He loves me, that He has a plan for me, America, the earth, and the cosmos.  That His plan will be fulfilled…PERIOD.  It is a plan for good, good wins, love wins, He wins.  My role in life is to go about doing as good a job as I can today.  To love others.  To serve.  To pick up the errant piece of trash.  To smile at everyone and wave.  To be kind.  To be nice.  To try as best as I can to do the right thing every moment, every glorious moment He gives me to be alive today.  He is the only way I have hope.  He has a plan and He will work it all out.  For Good.  For His Good, and it will be forever and evermore, GOOD.  

 

We Interupt this program to bring you this special annocement

6-8-2024 AD

(Government regulations have forced me to withhold this blog written five months ago until they (the government) would stamp their approval on what God approved on the above date)

I have never experienced adoption.  Our youngest son and his wife have been in the process for three years.  It has not been easy.  This is life at its most meaningful, being repeatedly and tragically snatched away.  Added to this, many of these situations come with tragic circumstances forcing our hearts to face unbearable realities.  We go through these things as a family.  More than once, we have laid upon the mountaintop altar with no baby in the bush.  But yesterday, June the seventh, two thousand and twenty-four AD, Joshua James Benson was born.   Today he lies in the arms of his mother, “skin to skin” as our son puts it.  I have moved the stakes out, widening our tent, and know, of all truths, this is the truest.  He was worth it all.  He is now ours!!!

Our littles Inca grandson, Joshua James Benson!!!