Eucharist, Pens, and Flowers

Gifts of flowers that are finally dying are like leftover Eucharist bread and wine; you never know quite what to do with them. I’ve always taken the bread and wine and poured it out on the ground in the woods and sprinkled the bread around for the birds. I made a sculpture three years ago, entitled Will the Circle Be Unbroken. It was homage to all the students, faculty, and administrators, and all they had done to help me live a most glorious life for the 32 years of my vocational career. It’s now become a sacred ground to place all the things I don’t know what to do with.  I end up placing used drawing pens*, old awards I was given that I never really deserved, and today, flowers from my children. God is good. God is great. Let us thank him. Wrote sitting in the woods looking at the sculpture.

*I used to live in Georgia near the Primitive, Howard Finster’s home and his working piece of sculpture, Paradise Garden.  He had a sculpture made of all the pens he had used over the years to make art.  

 

Strength Bursting Forth

My physical strength, waning out of me long ago, sowed into my sons and now my grandsons.  Yesterday I sat in the woods and watched them haul stones out and move to the top of Brown Mountain and begin the wall that will eventually corral my lover and my old long-gone shells.  We were a dancing, hiking, mountain-climbing wild pair, still are, but the wild is now in our eyes and in our memories.  We have both found Christ's abundant life to be a definitive walk on the wild side, wilder than we ever imagined life could be.  But I digress.  Happens when you’re talking about your lover.  

The point I am trying to make is me in my sons and grandsons.  It is better than the me that was in me.  I could go all day long, but now I can rejoice in them going all day long for me, serving me, helping me live the life I can no longer live independently…as if my physical strength waning out in me is bursting forth in them.  It is a great joy for me.   

The beginning of our Cemetery  

setting up one of my sculptures

Keeps splitting wood for next winter's warmth.

Grace, Grace, Mom's Grace

When I was a young Christian, I had relapsed and picked up an old habit of smoking.  I would hide it from my children by smoking outside and throwing my butts in the ash collection door at the bottom of our chimney.  By this time, we had three children, and one day they were playing kickball outside, and the ball hit the ash door and knocked it open, where they discovered all my hidden evidence.  They all three came running inside, exclaiming to Betty, “MOM, Dad’s started smoking again!!!”  

It was such a bitter defeat for me.  I felt so ashamed, I had let myself down, my children down, and ultimately my Savior.  

Later that day, I was sitting outside under one of our big oak trees, crying tears of defeat.  I called my mom to confess and seek wisdom.  After I told her, she started laughing and said one of the most wonderful statements of grace I have ever received: “Lee, don’t crucify yourself over smoking.  Jesus already did that.”  My spirits soared as they do now, some 40 years later.  I soon quit smoking again, this time for the last time.  Haven’t smoked since.  

The moral of this story is not that we shouldn’t smoke, I doubt God is much concerned with that, but that grace is often offered best by one of God’s servants who just happens to be my Mom.  

My grace teacher all my life, my mom

 

Spring's A Flirt

Spring always seems elusive, here today, gone tomorrow, always a hint but never the whole.  Tomorrow we declare its official start, and it had better be ready to get itself up and get going.  I am ready for a whole lot of spring, cool evenings, warm days.  I have no favorite season; they all bring their own special blessings to my life, but spring always seems to tease itself out, a flirt, flippantly tossing her hair and sashaying in front of me just before she flings a freezing, snowy wink my way.  

The snow storm this week.

 

A Sacred Task

I have set myself a sacred task.  We should all seek these and then walk, hike, and climb them.  Mine is a task of finding rocks.  Even the saying of it seems sacred to me.  Rocks are an exquisitely profound concept to begin with, and a good beginning is critical to a sacred path.  So I walk his woods every day and look for rocks.  They are natural nature so they blend in well and require a certain amount of my attention.  Paying attention is another part of a sacred path; if it is sacred, attention is important, having eyes to see and ears to hear.  I often strike a rock with my walking stick, and the ring informs.  What makes this walking task sacred?  The rocks will be the wall around our family graveyard where my lovers and my body will lie in wait for the resurrection.  Now that is a sacred task.   

 

Fading Away Thoughts

I can just see the buds turning the tree a slight green that goes on and off in my sight, old man eyes.  I sit in the hot tub as two eagles flirt around in front of me, trying to lock in love.  I can only imagine if they nest on our loaned mountain.  I sit still, my lover sits across from me, and I can feel her warmth through the water.  We are old dogs, been around the star a few times together,...she is singing, “Thank you, oh my Father for giving us your son…”  And the years fade till she is transformed into a new angel, which she makes me always believe.  The angel of my only.  Only is such a gift He gave me, my only, one and only, and only one.  We fade into one.    

Our hot dates are coffee and fudge by a stream,
 we know as our own, deep in Appalachia.  

 

Lasts

I now see more lasts than firsts.  When young, one sees the many first coming his way, but as one ages, it is the many lasts you are privileged to see.  The races run, the jobs well done, the tasks accomplished, the relationships you cultivated, and the students who inspired you.  Such was this past weekend, as two inspiring “young punk delinquents” came by to visit.  They were in the last art class I taught at Union.  In them, I was reminded of what a wonderful gift students gave me to have lived a life of such meaning and purpose.  Thank you, Micah and Annabella.