On Your Mark. Get set...

 40 years ago, I made a decision that seem minor, I changed my college major from geology to art.  My only reason, I had drawn all my life and loved it and a young secretary in the art office continued to encourage me to do so.  At the time I had no ideas about life except to try to have enough pot to get high a few times a day.  I was married with two children, and working at a deaf school which I thought I would do for the rest of my life.  Art would be a hobby.  On July 5th, 1986, I had a violent and physically, life-altering accident, and on November 10, of the same year, had a whole life-altering spiritual experience.  It was a literal coming home.  I was raised by a pastor and his wife, both of whom modeled Christ better than anyone I have ever known.  In the spring of 1991, I landed my first art professorship and have continued for 32 years.  I am retiring in May and am currently dismantling and packing up 40 years of art, art-making materials, tools, art images, art books, and volumes of art writing.  It is also life-altering.  An ending.  Even my muscle memory is set to the tune of 32 years of working.  This is a changing season for me, life-altering.  I feel as if I have been walking in one direction for 32 years and now God says, pick up and leave for a land I will show you.  That’s about all I know for now.  I am almost packed.  I have set myself to pick up.  On Your mark, get set…  

     

DUH

I am teaching on the Holy Spirit this week.  I have been renewed.  I never thought to talk to Him.  Never crossed my mind to begin a relationship with Him.  He is the one who is responsible for comforting me.  It is his role to counsel me.  It is His job to teach me about God and Jesus but also to remind me of “everything Christ said”.  It just might be important that I begin to develop a relationship with Him.  Show up!  Be in a committed, vibrant, and yes certainly, a deeply personal relationship with Him; if for no other reason, because I am in such great need of comfort, counsel, and reminding. 

Turn Your Eyes Upon...

It is finished!  Have you ever had the reality of that?  Some great work, some enormous task, some ongoing joy, some long road leading to terminal, some fight, some loving embrace, comes to an end.  I had one late yesterday afternoon.  A long, unimaginably wonderful, adventure came to an end.  There are a few loose ends that must be knotted off, a few jots and tittles, but the great journey is over.  I laid it down, turned one last time, and looking back, said, “thank you.”  Now my view is around the bend, over that next rise, Fair Haven, where I will winter out my greying years with my lover.  Oh the joys of a God who is so kind to give us great tasks done with great people, I can’t see them yet, they're just around yon bend, but I know my Father has prepared a coming good work for me…and I have turned my eyes once again, to the trail which lies ahead, up the lovely slopes of The Wonder Mountain.  

       

My Old Crush

I have known two moms in my life.  When I was little, I use to think my mom was the most beautiful woman on earth.  She would always be in a dress, flowered print with a thin matching belt.  She was my sweetheart, my first crush.  She would often tell me she had prayed to have me.   I was taken by her love for me and that it came in such a beautiful woman.  At 14 I veered off onto the highway to hades, on the road mostly.  I eventually got married, saved at 28, had four children, raised them on Jesus and the road, became an artist, worked, bought homes and land, and lived on the road.  I would see mom a few times every year.  She was someone who owned a home where I could always crash, rest and my family be well fed.  The children grew up, moved away, got married, had our grandchildren, and began their own life on the road.  I returned to knowing mom for the second time.  I hadn’t known her dearly for 50 years.  I do now.  She is just a shell of my original mom.  Death has a stone-cold grip on her physical body and is wringing hard the life out of her.  I sit with her quietly, she sleeping off and on, her body mocking my early memories of her.  She was the most beautiful woman I knew, and she loved me.  My mom is mostly a living body now, limited beyond imagination, a sliver of who she was so recently ago.  She is the two moms I know best, the one when I was just a child and now the one who is just a wisp, a tiny fragment of my old: crush.   

Mom and me.

           

My Anti-inflammatory God

I hurt from head to toe.  It takes me a while to get my body to get all its 65-year-old parts working.  I just asked God if he would be my Anti-inflammatory and began to write to him my complaining request.  Almost immediately I was reminded of all the Positive-Flame (atory) I have. My eyes, ears, nose, mouth, and feeling and He making all kinds of beauty I can see, hear, smell, taste, and feel.  I can see His Word this morning, hear my lover sleeping, smell Fair Haven, our home, and all her aromas reminding me I am sheltered.  I can taste the coffee in my beautiful handmade cup, and I can begin to feel my heart becoming a flame of warming light of his grace.  My heart and soul are fully functioning, I can wander in memories, wonder at dawn, my lover in love with me, our love making 19 more Bensons.  I have wood that makes fire, Krispy Kreme 30 miles away, and Living Water I can even now feel flowing through me.  This is grace.  My 65-year-old body is able to be conscious of its glorified state.  Thank you my “Flammantory” God.    

 

Getting Dirty in a White Tuxedo

I had a brief encounter with the news yesterday.  I am often shocked at how quickly I get stained.  Someone once told me, Lee “you know how not to get dirty?  Always wear a white tuxedo.”  I gloried in the sincere wisdom of that statement.  In 2008 I made a conscious decision to stop watching the news.  I often felt dirtied by it, felt like I had been shown things I was not capable of bearing up under, and many times felt like I had been taken to a XXX movie of life.  It was like I was self-harming my heart, mind, and soul.  No one can live in the drowning pool of technology today without occasionally getting a little filth splashed on you, tuxedo or not.  What bears down on me today is how civil so much wickedness has become, as if speaking of Auschwitz was talking innocently about Disney World.