All Lives Matter

Outta The Black Blue, Lives Matter

We got word last night.  He died outta the blue.  All lives matter.  You think that’s just a slogan.  What about Pervy who died so young as a black pastor but as sixth graders taught me how to play basketball.  We die.  We got the word last night.  A really good, good man, paler shade of brown than black.  My wife and I wept.  I stood at the kitchen window and talked to God—WHY?  What is the reason?  What a bruise.  All lives matter is a slogan—Really.   Then you haven’t lived long enough for enough loved ones to die.  What about Charlie, my best friend who at 19 shot himself in the heart, a heart that only longed to be loved.  Or what about Tim, my best friend who died in an instant, the wrong place at the wrong time.  If he had sneezed getting out of bed that morning he would have lived.  Or her, my dear friend who died awash in alcohol or my dad who was the greatest man I ever knew.  We die.  Or what about my wife’s parents who left her motherless and fatherless on the same day, my great uncle murdered, my neighbor and then his Godly, young daughter.  We die in ways unimaginable to the sweetness that we know as life.  All lives matter is not a slogan that we say to assuage us from one color of us dying.  It is a deeply held understanding for those of us who have loved enough to know enough of those we loved, who’ve died; that every one of us die—die, and that is the most heinous evil there is—death.  Is it possible that when we say “All Lives Matter” it is us stating a truth that you just haven’t learned yet because most of those you love are still alive? This newfound outrage is an outrage we have lived with longer than most of you have been alive.  Death came to our door again last night and got what he was looking for.  Death by murder or mystery is heinous because truly, all lives do matter.  

My old friend Pervy was joined by my new friend Lamar

It's Not About the Deer

My neighbor has a concrete deer in his yard, I have mused over it many a morning.  I am preaching today in Halls Tennessee at Halls First Baptist.  My two daughters are on the beach in Virginia and Texas.  My two sons are attending a sculpture workshop.  My lover sleeps as does my dog.  My mom is still in a virtual lockdown at her assisted living home.  Covid 19, dust storms, riots, and pulling down statues are happening all over.  In many ways the world is like a concrete deer, we are in it but we don’t need to be caught up in it, it’s just not that real.  What is real is my neighbor, not his concrete deer, Mr. Lanny is.  No one is marching down my neighborhood, we wave at each other, no one rioting, we smile and say hi, no them against us, no black masks or tear gas, no black or white or red just varying beautiful shades of brown.  It is peaceful here because we try and always remember we are neighbors; we are all scoundrels but we accept that and each other—and no one is trying to turn over my neighbor’s concrete deer.     

My neighbor's concrete deer.

How Far We Have Fallen

"What the world needs now is love, sweet love
It's the only thing that there's just too little of
What the world needs now is love, sweet love,
No not just for some but for everyone.'

This was one of the anthems of my youth and one of the first songs outside of hymns that I actually learned.  It was sung not only to protest the war in Vietnam but also in support of the Civil Rights movement.  My heart aches at how lost we have become from our ideals of how to protest and how to support. 

Father's Day

It is Father's Day, one of the grandest days of all and one of the most important, I would place it only behind Easter and Christmas.  The entire earth is established by how well we do our job as fathers.  It’s not our vocation, it’s not our hobby and it’s not natural for us.  We are fathers because of birth, we are good fathers because we want to be, we are great fathers because we are sacrificially determined to be.  No great father has considered his task and not fully known he wasn’t up to the job.  It takes a ton of help, secondly from our wifes but firstly from God in Christ by the Holy Spirit.  I was fortunate enough to have a great father who had only an alcoholic as his example.  My dad knew his father as a man but not a father.  My father's life was forever lived juxtaposed against a childhood of unimaginable sorrow and pain.  By grace, at 18, my father was born again into a new family with a new Father, God Almighty.  To my knowledge no one in his family was a believer at the time but afterwards everyone before him and all those of age after him are.  I watched him and my mom live a life of faithfulness through hardship, poverty, rejection and want, but I never did, because of them. I knew a living Christ, a happy family filled with examples of living well through all things because he chose to live by faith.  The greatest example of Christ I ever knew was him, in all my years of scoundrel wretchedness I never one time felt that he was anything but proud of me and grateful that I was his son.  I remember when I was a small child wearing my dad’s flipflops and thinking they were my skies; they were so big.  But even today as I think back on his life, now gone some 18 years, I still know my feet are so little when slipped into his shoes.  My Father's Day is always so overwhelmingly fulfilling even if my feet don’t fully fill his shoes.   

The greatest man I ever knew, my dad, Wayne Lee Benson

        

A Red-Letter Day

July 15, 2020, A.D.  A red-letter day for the Benson family.  It began a little over twelve years ago.  Betty and I got a call late at night from Sissy telling us that she was pregnant.  We were broken.  Betty and I crawled out of bed and got on our knees and began to pray through our weeping.  We prayed that God would be with her, that she would choose life for her baby and that somehow, we would make it through this.  All three of those prayers were answered and very shortly we began to pray for a worthy father for our second grandchild.  Both Betty and I were in the room with Sissy the night she gave birth to Cora Willow Benson.  I am weeping now.  This child has been a gift to us all and one Betty and I have carried so close to our prayer life.  She is securely sewn into the Family Circle Benson.  We all began to pray for a worthy father for Cora, one that would love her unconditional and would raise her in the fear and admonition of the Lord.  After a few years God answered that prayer and Clinton Bocephus Carbonell came into our lives, married Sissy and loved Cora seamlessly as his own, as God’s pick to be Cora’s father.  Yesterday the law signed on.  On Zoom, appropriately, all the Benson family set before our computer screens in front of the judge and the lawyer as Cora Willow Benson was renamed, Cora Willow Benson/Carbonell, the daughter of Bo and Mary Elizabeth Carbonell.  July 15, 2020, A.D., a red-letter day for the Benson/Carbonell family  

Adoption Day!!!

I'm Not In Your War

I’ve been furloughed, sent to the rear for some much-needed R&R at Fair Haven which is off grid.  I plant trees, dig wild flowers and plant them around my home, take long walks with my wife, read Louis Lamour, and spend two or three hours alone in the morning sitting outside and watching night become day allowing God quietly to be with me.  I spend a lot of time day dreaming, designing futures gardens, looking at young trees, attentive to my blue birds and their new families, smiling at the mountains in front of me as the first rays of sun bring them alive.  Somewhere out there I have a sense that America is on fire, that lots of people are angry, that we’re picking sides, dividing up, readying for war.  I’m not in no war! I try not to be in conflict with any man except myself. I am the worst of scoundrels, my worst enemy, and my only hope is to seek God’s grace to daily save me from me.  I am called to war against only one man, me and my flesh.  That is why I regularly need furloughed because evil (mostly spread by hearts on devices) is constantly trying to convince me that other men or my enemies, black men, white men, police men, democratic men, republican men, other men.  I am in conflict with no man but me.  Anyway, all my bluebirds are fluttering around vying for my attention each wanting to help, in their small way, to save me from me—and this blog was beginning not to help.        

My March For Reconciliation

When I was ten, 1968, we lived in Louisville KY.  My dad was in the seminary.  It was during the Civil Rights movement and there where riots in Louisville.  My dad drove us down to see it.  He talked to us about Jesus.  When I was 12, 1970, we moved to where my dad was called to pastor a church.  I was bused across town to an all-black school.  I knew nothing about it, it was just part of my life.  My dad talked to us about Jesus.  Later I was at Hardee’s where my older brother worked.  Two of his friends were there and I called them Negros, how I was taught.  One of them kindly corrected me saying, “I am not a negro I am a black man.”  I stood corrected.  My dad began to visit the black community and that year we had record attendance in Vacation Bible School, about half of us were black.  They took a picture.  The church soon met in a crowded Wednesday night business meeting and kicked my father out of the church.  My mother was carried out in weeping sadness.  My dad talked to us about Jesus.  In 1972, when I was 14, my dad was called to a church in a largely segregated part of the south.  Before he met with the deacon search committee, I asked him what he was going to do.  We all waited in the car.  When he came out, I asked him, “What did they say about the blacks?”  He said they said they were alright in their place.  He talked to us about Jesus.  In 1978 I was in the Navy.  A racial riot broke out on our ship.  I tried to break it up and was beaten to a pulp.  Thirty plus sailors where charged, tried and convicted at Captain’s Mast where I received a Captain’s Accommodation.  I lived in fear for my life and ran away from the Navy.  My dad talked to me about Jesus and sent me back.  I was sentenced to hard labor.  I eventually earned an Honorably Discharged.  In 2008 our wayward daughter, out on the road who knows where, called us in the middle of the night to tell us she was unmarried and pregnant with our second grandchild, a biracial granddaughter.  Betty and I crawled out of bed and got on our knees and cried out to our God.  We were broken asunder.  I told my dad.  He talked to me about Jesus.  Our granddaughter is named after his mother.  In 2011 I began work on The Seven Pillars, a sculpture to tell the story of the Black’s Contribution to the success of our community.  In 2020, this past Wednesday, our granddaughter helped us set the seven stones for the piece.  I talked to her about Jesus.  I feel like I have marched all my life, right behind my dad.  I wish my dad was here to talk to me.  I need a good father-son talk.  If you march you should march behind someone who is going to talk to you about Jesus.  I read Luke’s account of the Christmas Story.  He talked to me about Jesus.    

My Dad bottom right, my mom third up on left. "You Shoulda Seen It In Color" 

  

The Tragedy

There is a great tragedy occurring in our land, “love growing cold.”* It is perhaps the greatest sorrow of all time and playing out on all our devices. Love is not your right nor conjured up by you. It is first a Being, God, and in Him it is created and shared with all humans. But it can be lost, given away, seeped out of our angry hearts and vanished forever. The process has been exponentially accelerated by our addiction to those same devices that draw out of us the anger that is chocking our only life blood, love. It is sorrowful to see so many good, well-intentioned people trading in their free gift of love for cold rightness. You may be right but by the same whipping post you tie others to is the same post your anger is tying you to. “We shall overcome” is not a product of hatred parading as solidarity but a product of a growing love and a humble admission that there but by Almighty’s Grace, go I. We, not one single human, is ever more than the wretch we were born as(of which I am the worst); except and only by the grace of God in His Son Christ being allowed Lordship over our wretchedness. Do not let your anger cause you to sin and the greatest sin is to trade in your love for your rightness, a rightness that you don’t own.  You can lose the love in your heart; it can grow cold, and then it is gone; you can’t love others; you can’t love the color blue; you can’t love your dog; your love has grown cold and is gone.  Jesus does not lie.  Let that truth sink in.   “No one is good except God alone.”**  

*Matthew 24:12

**Mark 10:18

PS:  If you say, “How do I know if my love is being lost?”  Read 1 Corinthians 13 and you will know.

“It’s only in the mirror of God’s Word that you see yourself accurately, and only in his grace that you find help for what you see.”

New Morning Mercies, David Tripp, June 4^th

For further evidence read Hebrews 3:12-13