Me, Wow What A Gift

I am 62 today.  After I kissed my lover, crawled out of bed, got my first cup of coffee and sat down to read The Perfect Word, a fox walked across my front porch not 15 feet from me.  He was a beautiful animal, a bushy tail, white ring, and black tip, confidently loping along oblivious to me.  God knows how to give a gift and wrap it too.  At 62, in the dark, beside the river, gifted by God, reading His Long Letter, you think deeply about your life.  I paused and thought back, lots of messes, hurts and regrets but I thought only of good, 62 good years.  A year is a short time and 62 of them are shorter still; Einstein should have taken on that mystery.  I was once again reminded of the most significant life I had, the life given to me by God in Christ.  Difficult to understand but the simple version, the one I understand, is that He spared me from me.  Some of you will read this and know well who that me was but by grace, most of you won’t.  The most grace is reserved for me because I know him full well, I lived him, and it was him that God, in the greatest mercy and grace act ever known, saved me from and gave me the greatest gift possible, Him allowing me to know what it means to be me in Him and live this life.  This begins to read like a sermon but it is not, it is the truth as I have lived it for 62 years.  The fox doesn’t know himself from Adam, but God allows us to know ourselves and only when one can compare himself without God and himself with God can one truly know how kind, truly kind, God really is.  Happy 62 birthdays to me, brought to me by God, wow what a gift.  

Me at two.

Making Light and Light Making

I opened my studio at home yesterday, the clay studio, the one where the gentle love of the creative act allows me the joy of making without the deep mining soul rededication of making art.  Much like gardening, making pots is working with dirt and being dirty allows for no pretense, you’re just dirty.  But the work is ordained, sacred in that the dirt can grow a tomato or immerse itself is white heat to make red as beautiful as that of the tomato.  I often think of it like God making butterfly wings, it's not making light but it is light making.  

A student of mine, Riley Strong, took this picture
of a pear on a plate of mine.  God is so very, very good.

The Physical Possible Impossibility

We hate death!!!  It is why when someone famous and full of life surrounded by others of the same, even children, we are shaken to our collective core.  Why, we all know none of us are getting out of here alive.  I had to speak at a funeral a few years ago and I mentioned to a friend, Jon Larsen, that I hated death.  I will never forget his reply, “we rage against death because we are made eternal!”  Another man once wrote, “He (God) has planted eternity in the human heart”, King Solomon, the wisest human to ever live.  We all, every human, holds two things in common, we live, we die, but we all hate the latter.  A great contemporary artist, Damien Hirst, came up with one of the most prophetic art titles of all time, “The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living” which speaks directly to our idea about death.  My son Zac shared with the family this morning that he read that Mr. Bryant and his daughter Gianna had attended 7 a.m. mass the morning of the crash.  This one act testifies to everything written here.  Mr. Bryant himself raged against death and the last thought on his mind was that eternity awaiting him that day but just in case he prepared himself for it.  And because he was a great father he led his daughter to prepare for it as well.  Mass is a re-aligning of oneself to what matters, to placing God through Christ as Lord over your life, including when your life here ends and your life in eternity begins.  And that is what this fact testifies to.  Mr. Bryant knew he had no power over life or death, over his or his daughters, but he knew Who did, and by this simple act of childlike faith placed his and lead his daughter to place hers in Him who has overcome death.  “He (Jesus) will wipe every tear from their eyes, and there will be no more death or sorrow or crying or pain.  All these things are gone forever.”  And the one sitting on the throne said, “Look I am making everything new!”  And then he said to me, “Write this down, for what I tell you is trustworthy and true.”  Revelation 21

Blue Like Hope

I often awake in the middle of night worn thin by the wears of this life.  I lay in the dark for a while before rising and stumbling into the living room and began again to read the Psalms.  No one who has found themself under the Lordship of His Word while beneath the crashing blue waves of life can fully describe The Ancient of Days coming in the form of The Written Word.  As your hand strikes the LifeLine and you know the full ecstasy of knowing by grace you have stuck The Rope that will save you as you were sinking deep, hope comes like salvation, you have been saved once again.  You stumble back down the hall, wrap yourself in quilt and lovers warmth and again go back to peace named sleep. 

Saw this driving over the Tennessee River in Savanah. 

Cheers To The Magic Carpet

I had a grand treat yesterday, enclosed in a small, warm, safe space, wrap-around glass, with loving, funny people, high in the snow-covered mountains picnicking on great food, dessert, and hot coffee.  We glided through hollows white with snow with wet black boulders in the creases and silver streams bouncing icily along and slowly winged to the tops of ancient passes now crystal cathedrals of God.  I was surrounded by those that loved and celebrated me with laughter and good cheer while The Great Ageless One provided the entertainment, a blockbuster hit, The Great Smoky Mountains.  Days of treats they are, these days of burrowing in with loved ones in a magic carpet hiking the soul-warming cold of The Ancient of Days ancient hills.  Cheers to family, cheers to love, cheers to birthdays, cheers to God, cheers to the minivan.