Day 11,680 Begins

HAPPY LAST DAY OF CLASS!!!

🥳🎉🥳🎉🥳🎉🥳🙃

Early this morning, still dark and quiet while reading the Word, praying, and listening to God there came an angel quietly into my room, wings folded and whispering the text above; she came wearing hats, flinging streamers, and blowing horns, but with soft hands over my heart.  For today was a grand, glorious day but also an end, and the balloons, though filled, were also to float away toward another day, another place…”  I wrote back to her.  “How could 32 years go by so quick?  A twinkling of my eye!”   And so, this day of all days started the same as all the other days of these many years.  I awoke, brewed the good coffee Betty had set the night before, picked a beautiful cup, sat down, opened The Ancient Text, read, prayed, meditated, and wrote…and day, 11,680, began like all the rest, with God.  And will end like none of the others but still the same…i go with GOD. 

Thank you, Sissy, love dad. 

 

A "Fortunate Son" is not delusional.

Let’s be delusional.  We think the man in the White House deserves to be there.  He is the best we can do.  He is an elderly gentleman suffering from dementia being paraded and puppet-ed on the world stage and no one really knows who is running our country.  Gas prices, grocery prices, building prices, and prices period are ok.  Nashville’s massacre is about ice cream. The world is good.  Brics? Turkey?  Ukraine?  Ok, a man can be a woman because he says he is a woman.  That is as delusional as saying Sponge Bob is a sponge or a Bob.  A man is a man, and a woman is a woman and nothing, laws, rules, popular culture, shaming, TikTok, CNN or Facebook will change the truth.  But we can agree to be deluded.  Because all of this is delusional.  Remember when you all agreed “down with the man!” or “turn on, tune in, drop out” but now you are all turned on by the man, tuned in to his rhetoric, and dropped out of your intelligence.  Remember?   “Well, that ain’t me.”   

Easter beauty with Hosea

Your Word again scorches your children, your wrath being manifest in your words.  They are scathing.  You are so hurt by their infidelity, their whoring after idols and strong kingdoms.  In the middle, you seethe out these words, “For I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice, the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings.”  I am taken aback by your longing for us to love you with a “steadfast” and longing love.  What God needs like you need.  I have heard preachers repeatedly say, “God doesn’t need anything!” so why do you speak of your longing for our love?  Do you really need us?  Are we that important to you?  If this weekend (Easter) means anything it means you desperately want us.  Father, I never want to step outside our relationship, but I am so heartened by your longing in the midst of your wrath.   

I long to leave for some far-off place; to go away into the north or maybe far west or deep southwest.  I long to go.  But go to what.  Beauty!  I rest in beauty, know you best there, filled, secure in You are.  Beauty is your cleft in the rock for me, where you often hide me to be with you.  It is raining outside, the river ripe with it, green drinking it like warm wine, inviting spring like a lover to come; so appropriate for Easter Saturday.  Come, Lord Jesus. Come!  

The Living Supper

Betty and I celebrated the Lord’s Supper with mom yesterday in the hospital.  There is something deeply Living in taking the Bread and Wine.  I asked mom if she knew why Jesus wanted us to remember him by this observance and she said, “because he gave his life for me.”  She rose singularly to the occasion as if being called forth from the shadow of death to the table He prepared for her in the presence of her enemies, her own body.  Even in a greying brain, some things are deeply living throughout the whole creature, the living being, saved by grace, clings longest to The Savior.  

An American Emergency Room

I spent 9 hours in an American Emergency Room with my mom.  From seven yesterday evening until four this morning.  First in Crossville and then transferring to UT Medical Center in Knoxville.  Emergency rooms are where the most pitiful, the neediest, and those who are on their last leg come to be assured of care.  They are madhouses of those suffering violence, catastrophe, sudden illness, injury, and hopelessness.  They have criminals, sinners, saints, and most are weary and heavy ladened.  Some are dying, some have nowhere else to turn, and most are hurting and need help.  The nurses, staff, orderlies, interns, assistants, and doctors or in a vague stupor of denial.  Seeing, healing, working, often laughing but all have a certain level of forced unconsciousness, vitally aware but necessarily aloof.  They speak in confident uncertainties, vague promises, hopeful unknowing, and wise textbook guesses.  And above all else, time is meaningless.  Lab coats come and go, pushing wheeled abstractions, bags of elixirs, poles, machines, displays, magic carpets, beeps, buzzes, jingles, screeches, and alarms.  On occasion, some human being will yell, scream and in terror wail out, echoing down the halls and immediately you are drawn back to the truest truth, you are in an American Emergency Room.  

Mom and me.