A Reunion, "On A Slow Train Bound for Nowhere"

I graduated from high school 50 years ago this year.  It was 1976, our country's bicentennial.  It made us feel special, unique, as only an 18-year-old can feel, like the world was made for us.  I came to high school as I did for almost all grades, from another town, in the middle of my freshman year, my dad taking another church.  I felt like an outsider, didn’t belong, and didn't want to.  I was good at sports, which had always served me well, like a cloak that made me someone when I was no one.  It was a time of greats, great angst, great loves, great meaning, great losses, when your total memory was 18 years, and all experiences were exquisitely profound, and you would die for a small band of brothers and sisters.  It was 3 1⁄2 years, a little less than a quarter of my life then, but now at 68, it makes up half the memories I remember.  I left that town “and took off for the sky” and never came back except when I think about “The Way We Were.”  Oh, to find myself “on a warm summer’s evening on a train bound for nowhere” with a few of those who make up many of the memories of my heart.  

 

The Long Missing

I was so fortunate that when I was born, I was born to two people who had been saved by Christ, not primarily saved from sin, or saved from hell, or saved from moral transgressions, but Christ had saved them from the most hellish and dysfunctional of family life.  Both their fathers, our first image of God, were terrible alcoholics, and both died at the age of 41. Drunk.  

So my parents raised me as someone who would actually die if they didn’t have Christ to save them from the life they were raised in.  Two young people who knew only two ways of life: hell or saved by Christ.  It made for me an immersive experience in Christ in the church by two people who had been truly saved in salvation and saved from their lives on earth.  My early life was in many ways idyllic. Were there problems?  Yes, tremendous problems, hurtful, exceedingly difficult, but I lived through them with two parents who never wavered from a total commitment to Christ, home, and church.  They had limited resources, no family to fall back on, scarce opportunities, but they had all of Christ because they gave up all of themselves to have all of Him.  

As a child, this was my bedrock.  As a young man, they remained my bedrock for understanding Christ even though I was racing down the highway to hell, seemingly bent to get there.  But they never wavered.  Love, admiration, and acceptance were all the bedrock of my young man years.  Did they become exasperated by my life?  Yes!  My mom once told me she would walk the backyard at night and pray, “Lord, take him home or me one!”  But she never backed down or walked away.

In my mid-life, they were my silent Big Rock Mountain.  Always there.  Always strong.  Always the ever-present help in seeing faith lived out in their greying years.  My constant and greatest example of what it meant to live a prolonged and consistent walk of salvation.  

Now they are gone.  And all they have been for me is all they are to me.  They are in me as much as the forest soil is in the tree.  I am my Mother and Father’s son.  I was not saved from them but by them.  They were the ones who brought me to Christ, and the memory of them still demands I go to him and him alone.  Only he can save me and mine.    

Mom and me.

Flamboyant Speed of Grace

These are two true things. 

The strength I have to live any given day has significantly decreased.

I am gifted with the ability and the quietness of slowness to be hyper-focused on small things, which bring much greater meaning, thoughtful consideration, and exquisite insights.

Solomon was mistaken.  Life is very meaningful, especially when experienced at the flamboyant speed of the floating grace of the aged.  

P.S.  On reading Ecclesiastes. 

Evening picnic on the river.

God's Glorious Gifts of Baptisms

Summer is hard on me; its heat and the extended daylight give me time to task meaningful work, but this in turn depletes me of energy that is no longer readily available or replenished as rapidly or fully as my body needs.  Summer is a sprinting marathon of activity.  The rewards are lots of blues and greens, colors, sunsets, and flowers, long hours freeing some up for resting, and a time for the balm of expectations of fall and the glorious warming fires of winter.  

One great gift of my now knowing meaning of summer is a regular baptism in the waters of our mighty Tennessee.  After a hard day of meaningful work, it is glorious to sink my body down in her cooling waters of gilead gently washing the pain and sweat away–a cleansing like no other, equal to the need of the hardness of summer on my poor, old soul.     

 

Blackberries, The Heavens, and The Fermi Paradox

My wife and I bike every day, and at the end of our route is a half-mile section of a wonderfully abundant blackberry patch.  We stop every time, picking handfuls to replenish our depleted energy.  For some unknown reason, I have begun to stare up into the heavens, into the blueness, into the clouds floating above, into the starry night sky, indigo and deep.  It also replenishes me in the same way the blackberries do.  I don’t know why, but both are deeply sacred experiences.  And another.  I have discovered the Fermi Paradox and have studied it in depth, and marvel at the simplicity of the answer to this “crisis of expectation over observation.”  This too is a sacred study for me and replenishes my faith, love, and worship of the Holy Trinity.  Oh, the joy of the nourishing of my soul.   

The blackberry patch that started it all.

      

 

An Exquisite Element

There is no greater element of art than line.  It seems so humble, hidden always from our consciousness, but think, all the wisdom of the western world is recorded with 26 letter lines and 9 number lines.  The first thing God did to tell me He Is, was write a line, I AM!  All works of art begin with lines defining the edge, and the best, all love letters are a long line of love telling.

Here is a picture of an exquisite line because of what it represents to me.  Every morning as I begin to pray, I light a stick of incense to acknowledge the Psalm, “Accept my prayer as incense offered to You.”  

 

To My Dad

I miss you.  The great void in my sky that your falling like a mighty oak left is still just as void and just as blue. Your presence with me was so great, like breath that I often breathed deeply…but without notice.  You molded and made me, always the example of right, and how to live right, that was both a blessing and a goad.  Now my old self even looks just like you, walks with your gait, thinks on life like you lived, Your God has become my God, and your home with him will eventually be mine.  Those soft and real memories made when my mind, heart, and soul were so sincerely absorbent are still so real to me, you living in front of me, like a best seller of the one thing I still have, the Christ in you you sowed into me.  Thanks, Dad. I miss you.  Until we meet again!!!

Dad on top of Big Rock Mountain, where he taught 
me to see God in everything.