Your Place In The Milky Way

It is hard to sit near a mountain and worry.  Yesterday we rode through the mountains of East Tennessee and sat beside the Tennessee River.  Everywhere I looked were fallen trees and standing timber, water flowing slowly by, mud and grass and deep fallen leaves and the sun shone above it all.  I sat and wondered at how the earth lives and dies, falls and rises, grows and erodes away without a single conscious moment of effort.  All this powerful might of force and perfection continually happening, being.   And even now it is rocketing through space and time, occupying its place in an arm of the Milky Way Galaxy being earth and never a moment’s worry.  Worry is a curse of the poorer conscious. 

A Great One Liner

Dawn is often the greatest gift God gives us for peace!

Lazarus (insert your name here), come forth.

I am a planner.   I like to have some path laid out long before I cross over the hill.  It is good to plan even in light of Christ’s admonition, “Don’t worry about tomorrow…”  Why?  Life, in large part, is successfully lived because you have planned to live it.  I know it sounds obvious but most people do not plan on living life as much as they plan on being alive.  There is a great difference in being alive and living.  One great motivator for living is thinking how I might be “Christ’s ambassador” today and act on living according to the plan. 

(For more on this and other subjects attend my slide lecture and show opening, Tuesday, February 17, 4:30 p.m. in A72 at Union University)

Determination

There is a life that lives itself to be with God.  All other lives are measured by it.  There is a glimpse of it in art making, that flaming creativity from whence art springs, that burns like molten gold for a moment and then disappears for eons causing one to wonder did it occur at all.

Being with God is mostly a determination to be with God, as making art is mostly a determination to get up every day and practice art making. 

Putting these two thoughts in the same sentence does not place them in the same category.  One is King, the Great I AM, the other a mere thing His grace allows me to love Him through. 

Show and Tell

One of the greatest gifts you can give yourself is to take a walk and see how much beauty you can discover.  Discovery is one of the greatest gifts God has bestowed upon human beings and the discovery of beauty can be a sincere act of worship. 

(For more on this and other subjects attend my slide lecture and show opening, Tuesday, February 17, 4:30 p.m. in A72 at Union University)

If You're Standing You Should Be Praising Someone…just not you

The gift to know up from down, left from right, front from back, is incalculably value.  Deaf people struggle with this because a great deal of this information is derived from the inner ear.  This knowledge is, at every conscious moment, being recalibrated and fed to our brain which in turn feeds it to our bodies which makes thousands of continuous calibration to keep us stable on planet earth.  But this miracle would be meaningless without an equal miracle; we are able to relationally know the same up/down truth about every object we encounter.  To fully understand the gift you have you need only to stand in a completely dark room and experience complete equilibrium while a deaf person in the same room would just as likely fall down as stand up.  A deaf person uses visual cues to establish their balance. 

(For more on this and other subjects attend my slide lecture and show opening, Tuesday, February 17, 4:30 p.m. in A72 at Union University)