A Simpleton's Guide To Guides

I finished reading the Bible through this morning for the 32^nd time.  My confession of this experience is that This Living Thing housed in a book has changed my life.  I also confess that I am a simpleton as, I imagine, are all humans.  Simpletons need a plan to follow, a guide to keep us from making a mess of things.  The last thing I will confess is that when I combined reading This Living Thing with turning off all news media, the effect was dramatic and the effect on me was profound, it wasn’t so much that it helped me to not make a mess but to start to clean up the mess—around me. 

What Is Your Plan

I have read several biographies of our founding fathers and am always struck by the truth that these people invented a country.  It was an overwhelming task, just think of the administrative difficulties of running your individual life and then think about applying that to a country full of individuals.  Therein lies another truth, it is impossible to have a country much less a great one without a plan and a concerted and daily effort to understand the plan, our Constitution and our Bill of Rights—and a willingness for all those individuals to live by it.  But what prompted this blog is how few individuals today have a plan, constitution or bill of rights, for living their own life, a concerted and daily effort to understand the plan and the strength of character committed to living the life the plan demands.   

The Baddest Creature At Fair Haven

The motion light on our dock comes on and wakes me up.  It’s 2 a.m. That beaver again, the one who has been gnawing on my trees!  I get up, slip on my shoes and head down to the dock.  Quiet, cold, pitch dark.  Full on fog a foot above the river floats quietly in the grey mist circle of the dock light.  Walk around in the dark.  All of a sudden I think, “If the creature from the black lagoon comes up out of that river in the fog I’m a goner.”  Then I consider, “is killing this beaver worth being dragged to my doom by the creature from the black lagoon?”  Bring it on Lagoon Head; they didn’t have a nine-millimeter in the movie.  Never saw the beaver.  Hope that lagoon creature got him.  Walked back up to the house without looking back.  Tucked myself back in bed next to my warm sleeping lover knowing how lucky she was to be sleeping next to the baddest creature at Fair Haven. 

Miss Tennessee

Piano Man Women; Miss Tennessee

“It’s four o’clock on a Saturday, the regular crowd shuffles in….” It is 4a.m., it’s dark outside and the regular crowd shuffling in is me.   We are at Fair Haven; it’s us, the mountain, the trees, and Miss Tennessee—“who we’ve been coming to see…” I love my Tennessee River, she’s never voted for anyone, she’s not liberal or conservative, she doesn’t watch CNN or Fox, she doesn’t send pipe bombs, call others racists, build walls, kill unborn children, slander good men, create refugees, block freedom—she just is.  She is older than Tennessee, older than America, older than China, North Korea, Syria, Egypt, Babylon, and Ur.  She’s been around, and now she’s wrapped around me.  A few feet in front of me, slowly, quietly, gently, she’s awake in the dark in my front yard.  I can’t see her but I feel her, I know she’s there waiting on dawn just like me because—it’s her I’ve “been coming to see to forget about life for a while.” 

The Hows and Whys of Teaching Art

There is a certain relationship between the desire to be with God and the desire to teach art.  Both are hope-filled acts, the first a confession of our great need, the second a grateful thank you for our need being met by leading others to confess their need.  Nothing makes our inadequacies more apparent than meeting sincerely with God, our inability to live well, to be kind, to act moral, to share, to love without conditions than meeting with Someone who is the Shining Example of all of those traits.  But the generosity goes further, The Great Shining, in these meetings, shares His traits with us.  And therein lies the connection.  Every human’s greatest need is to love God.  The redeemed don’t know how and the unredeemed have no reason.  Teaching art is showing not only how but also why.  How is by saying thank You for the elements of art by using them well and why, is because you didn’t invent them and The One who did, shared.